Factorio Pulling Saved Games Out of Thin Air

[MrGrim]

This one is bizarre. Not really a bug, but it's something I cannot explain for the life of me.

Until terrain generation is fixed I decided to revert back to 0.12.35. I have a large data drive, D:, that I backed up my 0.12.35 AppData folder to. Since I spent a lot of time making various mods work for 0.13 that haven't been publicly updated yet I also backed up my 0.13 AppData folder. So I have two folders:

D:\Backups\Factorio AppData\0.12.35
D:\Backups\Factorio AppData\0.13.3

So, with that done I told Steam to install the 0.12.35 branch. Then I deleted the current AppData\Factorio and copied my 0.12.35 backup to it. So far so good.

I started Factorio, and it had some of my 0.13 saves when I went to load a game. Weird, but I figured maybe I copied the wrong backup over. So, I deleted the AppData folder again and verified the contents of my 0.12 backup and copied it over again. This time I visually verified no 0.13 saves were in the AppData\Factorio\saves folder and I emptied the recycle bin. I started Factorio again, and noticed 0.13 saves were there once more! I exited and the very same explorer window I just used to verify had no 0.13 saves now had them there!

I repeated this a couple of times watching the explorer window after launching Factorio and would see the save files magically appear shortly before the Factorio loading screen displayed!

So, I told windows to search every drive on the entire system for the name of one of the 0.13 save files, and I found it in only one location; "D:\Backups\Factorio AppData\0.13.3\saves".

I keep wondering, how on earth does Factorio know about this folder? So, I decide to try to trick it. I archived the entire backup location into a 7zip file and deleted the loose files. Started Factorio again, and saves appeared out of nowhere once more!

I'm on the verge of blaming the supernatural.. where is Factorio pulling these saves from?!

[Oxyd]

Steam Cloud, possibly?

[MrGrim]

Steam Cloud, possibly?

Of course! I totally forgot Steam does that!

Wow! Thank you! You've helped save my sanity tonight!

[Nexela]

Happens to me all the time, takes a OMGWHY face before I realize it.