People who have just one save file...why?

[Kyralessa]

I see so many topics here about people whose save file has been corrupted (usually due to their computer's failing memory or a misbehaving mod), so I have to ask:

Why do you only have one save file?

When I start a new game and save it, I save it with my designated name, e.g. Whatever1.

Then next time I save: Whatever2.

Then Whatever3, Whatever4, Whatever 53, Whatever 108.1, etc.

Why doesn't everybody do this? Why do people use one single solitary save file, so that if it gets corrupted, it's game over?

[Loewchen]

Most people do that, but for the common corruption it does not help because the saves do not get corrupted themselves, what gets corrupted is the game in memory, it is then saved to file. They will not notice that the saves are broken until they try to load them at which point they likely cycled through all of them and none are loadable anymore.

[eugenekay]

Most people trust their computer not to have corruptions suddenly, and thus have never had a reason to adopt paranoid multiple-save schemes. Factorio’s insistence upon byte-perfect Save & Load functionality is something of an Outlier - most programs / Games will blindly accept the corrupted data leading to Crashes or broken behavior further down the line.

I agree that the “3 Autosaves” strategy is not sufficient, given the number of issues apparently encountered in the wild. I have always liked Date-based saves, and as many as a dozen by default. OpenRCT2’s strategy is pretty good in this regard.

Edit: There is a reason to only have 3/5/10/whatever Autosaves by default: Savegame synchronization (such as Steam Sync) has a limit to the amount of data (1GB?) that can be stored for each game. With a large map and lots of auto saves you can exceed this - breaking auto-sync. Manual action is then required to reduce the number of auto-saves; this guaranteed eventual failure would be a worse user experience for most people than the possibility of corruption occurring.

[Kyralessa]

Edit: There is a reason to only have 3/5/10/whatever Autosaves by default: Savegame synchronization (such as Steam Sync) has a limit to the amount of data (1GB?) that can be stored for each game. With a large map and lots of auto saves you can exceed this - breaking auto-sync. Manual action is then required to reduce the number of auto-saves; this guaranteed eventual failure would be a worse user experience for most people than the possibility of corruption occurring.

Understandable...but then that's a good reason to use the standalone installer rather than run the game through Steam.

[Kyralessa]

Most people do that, but for the common corruption it does not help because the saves do not get corrupted themselves, what gets corrupted is the game in memory, it is then saved to file. They will not notice that the saves are broken until they try to load them at which point they likely cycled through all of them and none are loadable anymore.

Sure, but do their saves get corrupted from the very first one?

If you've saved a 50-hour game roughly every half-hour and suddenly your save is corrupted, how likely is it that all 100 saves are corrupted? Losing a few hours is disappointing, but not as disappointing as losing 50 hours.

[Loewchen]

If you've saved a 50-hour game roughly every half-hour and suddenly your save is corrupted, how likely is it that all 100 saves are corrupted? Losing a few hours is disappointing, but not as disappointing as losing 50 hours.

Well I thought the 108 saves number was hyperbolic, I doubt many people will cycle more than ten, most just three. I cycle three saves but only save manually when ending a session so I should never lose more than that session even when all autosaves are corrupted as well. But I also never had a save file getting corrupted myself.

[Kyralessa]

Well I thought the 108 saves number was hyperbolic, I doubt many people will cycle more than ten, most just three. I cycle three saves but only save manually when ending a session so I should never lose more than that session even when all autosaves are corrupted as well. But I also never had a save file getting corrupted myself.

I've got two or three games where it went up to 200. I don't use Steam for Factorio, so I don't have an artificial limit imposed on me.

[Tertius]

Why doesn't everybody do this? Why do people use one single solitary save file, so that if it gets corrupted, it's game over?

May be it's a Gen Z thing. The digital natives from Gen Z always lived in a world where computers are reliable, stable and forgiving. You need 1 save, because you play with one game state, you need this one game state only, so you save this game state and nothing else. You don't need a backup, because if there was a requirement for a backup, the app would have included it and performed automatic backups. If the app doesn't provide this, a backup isn't needed. It just works. And if it happens that it doesn't work, it's a totally unexpected and a real catastrophe for them.

How old are you? I guess you're a bit older. Probably you grew up with computers malfunctioning, hardware and software. A sudden crash, and all your work is destroyed, because there are no autosaves. Someone who grew up with earlier computers will save every few minutes as reflex. In contrast to this, I saw young people create a document or an excel sheet in the morning, work all day with it, not save the whole day, close their notebook in the evening (app still open), open to notebook the next morning, continue work, and at the end of the day they close the app and save the document the first time, when the app asks if it should save that unsaved document on close. And it works, because the app does perfect autosaves and seamlessly restores any interrupted app state on restart. Incredible!

[MEOWMI]

I was taught to keep progressive saves of newer versions, just in case the newest save gets ruined somehow. It takes a bit more space, and eventually you might have to clean up and go delete some old ones, but I find it is very worthwhile. I think my Space Exploration playthrough saves ended up numbered all the way up to 100. The thing is, you almost never need them, so it's easy to not pick up the habit to begin with, or you might drop it even after you started doing it, and on top of that you might still lose a bit of progress... but it can still save your ass.

[Jap2.0]

This highest I've reached is 140 saves in one world... that one I never finished putting the "new" (0.15) science into. My SA save is up to 76, but I've been pretty busy the past year. If I need more disk space or move to a new computer I might not keep all of them (or just leave some backed up somewhere) but generally I just increment a number at the end every time I save.

[qwr]

I'm currently up to save 80, with about 90 hours played this run. I have never gone back to use older saves, except to maybe look at the screenshots of where I was back then. It's a waste of disk space, but disk space is cheap nowadays. For Nauvis and Vulcanus, each save was about 11 MB, but after I explored a bunch of new chunks looking for coal, the save file increased in size.

A completely unnecessary way to save space would be storing incremental deltas between save files. But this would make any compression harder, as all the saves are distinct zip files.

I did my first play through (before space age) with "record replay" on, but I left it off this game because I don't plan on making another time lapse.

[Kyralessa]

How old are you? I guess you're a bit older. Probably you grew up with computers malfunctioning, hardware and software. A sudden crash, and all your work is destroyed, because there are no autosaves. Someone who grew up with earlier computers will save every few minutes as reflex. In contrast to this, I saw young people create a document or an excel sheet in the morning, work all day with it, not save the whole day, close their notebook in the evening (app still open), open to notebook the next morning, continue work, and at the end of the day they close the app and save the document the first time, when the app asks if it should save that unsaved document on close. And it works, because the app does perfect autosaves and seamlessly restores any interrupted app state on restart. Incredible!

Well...let's just say I'm old enough to have started gaming on an Atari 2600 and then an Apple //e, and to have hand-edited my AUTOEXEC.BAT on a PC to use LOADHIGH to free up more main memory.

And I'm a programmer, which also feeds my paranoia.

[wobbycarly]

How old are you? I guess you're a bit older. Probably you grew up with computers malfunctioning, hardware and software. A sudden crash, and all your work is destroyed, because there are no autosaves. Someone who grew up with earlier computers will save every few minutes as reflex. In contrast to this, I saw young people create a document or an excel sheet in the morning, work all day with it, not save the whole day, close their notebook in the evening (app still open), open to notebook the next morning, continue work, and at the end of the day they close the app and save the document the first time, when the app asks if it should save that unsaved document on close. And it works, because the app does perfect autosaves and seamlessly restores any interrupted app state on restart. Incredible!

Well...let's just say I'm old enough to have started gaming on an Atari 2600 and then an Apple //e, and to have hand-edited my AUTOEXEC.BAT on a PC to use LOADHIGH to free up more main memory.

And I'm a programmer, which also feeds my paranoia.

Maybe it's an age thing

08-19-2025, 18-42-36.png (52.17 KiB) Viewed 642 times

[Tertius]

And I'm a programmer, which also feeds my paranoia.

Maybe it's an age thing

08-19-2025, 18-42-36.png

About paranoia. I bet you cannot beat me. I'm really paranoid if comes to backups. This dates back from personal experience in the PC world starting with DOS 3.0 and instable Windows 3.1 (crashed 2-3 times a day). My Factorio saves folder looks similar to the screenshot (including the items not shown), however I also have scheduled backups running every few hours at daytime, with multiple backup generations hourly, daily (last 5 days), weekly (last 10 weeks), monthly (last 10 months, yearly (so far: 2 years). It's not only that, I also run a additional 2nd independent backup program which does almost the same again. It all ends up on 2 different USB drives. A 3rd mechanism mirrors crucial data to the cloud (Onedrive). I used to have tapes , but fortunately got rid of them. Is all this necessary? Probably not. Autosaves are really good today.

This is also a curse from my previous work, where I was responsible for creating and maintaining an enterprise wide backup reporting in a banking environment.

[NineNine]

And I'm a programmer, which also feeds my paranoia.

Maybe it's an age thing

08-19-2025, 18-42-36.png

About paranoia. I bet you cannot beat me. I'm really paranoid if comes to backups. This dates back from personal experience in the PC world starting with DOS 3.0 and instable Windows 3.1 (crashed 2-3 times a day). My Factorio saves folder looks similar to the screenshot (including the items not shown), however I also have scheduled backups running every few hours at daytime, with multiple backup generations hourly, daily (last 5 days), weekly (last 10 weeks), monthly (last 10 months, yearly (so far: 2 years). It's not only that, I also run a additional 2nd independent backup program which does almost the same again. It all ends up on 2 different USB drives. A 3rd mechanism mirrors crucial data to the cloud (Onedrive). I used to have tapes , but fortunately got rid of them. Is all this necessary? Probably not. Autosaves are really good today.

This is also a curse from my previous work, where I was responsible for creating and maintaining an enterprise wide backup reporting in a banking environment.

I do the same. I love rsync. I've got a copy of my saves local, but I back them up after every safe to another hard rive on my server, and then back that server up every week or so, onto two other sets of hard drives.
Storage space is so cheap that it's almost free. To me, it makes a lot of sense to just do a bunch of backups to avoid catastrophic data loss. It's not difficult or expensive. I don't do anything with "the cloud". It's all on my own, physical hard drives. I'm not keen on storing my data on other peoples' servers.

[Tertius]

I don't do anything with "the cloud". It's all on my own, physical hard drives. I'm not keen on storing my data on other peoples' servers.

Reasoning for cloud usage: if something goes wrong locally, the data is still in the cloud. If something goes wrong with the cloud, the data is still locally. If something goes wrong with both things at the same time, I look out of the window and expect mushroom clouds, so there are more severe issues than data loss.

[Juancho76]

I have never had a game corruption before, I have around 500 hrs in factorio, maybe it's too little? or is it a factorio+mods issue?

[Stargateur]

you mean that give me a reason to do a fresh start again ? SAY NO MORE.

[NineNine]

you mean that give me a reason to do a fresh start again ? SAY NO MORE.

I agree 100%. If I lost all of my saves, I'd be kind of thrilled that I'd be forced to start from scratch again.

[Shirasik]

Then Whatever3, Whatever4, Whatever 53, Whatever 108.1, etc.

Where did you get infinite storage space?

As for data loss (aka corrupted saves).

Top1 malfunctioning hardware related to data is storage devices. If storage device dies then all your saves are lost. Including saved BPs.

Chips (CPU, chipsets, RAM banks, etc), if used within nominal working conditions, have virtually infinite lifespan. Their MTBF is millions of hours. What you must be concerned of is reliable power supply with significant power reserve.

And top0 reason of data loss is.. software. But Factorio isn't considered to be a reliability-focused software so it's fine if Factorio blindly trusts to hardware.