Factorio Forums

So, I'm a little frustrated now that I didn't have backups of the save files.

I just launched the game, running admittedly beta .15.34, and within a second of launching I went into a blue screen (windows 10). After stopping the machine and restarting, then launching Steam, the attempt to launch Factorio was met with Factorio being re-downloaded. At first I got excited, thinking 'hey, perhaps 0.16 is out'. Checking the forum while it installed, I realised it wasn't going to be a new release. Ah well, no problem, I thought. Game finished loading, and ... bam, no save games are there, no mods. After a quick search in the forum, I discover the same game location and it's completely empty. If only I'd thought this through, i might have even captured the log file while it launched, but there's nothing.

I'm just checking. Are saves kept anywhere else? Should a re-install really have completely wiped those folders (i.e. potential bug). Does anyone else adopt any mechanism to save their saves? I'm guessing Steam isn't actually saving anything?

I'm not too distraught, as essentially this is just an opportunity to build it again ... BUT BIGGER.

Any chance I can find my save or has it gone forever into the binary heap?

Factorio itself does not ever delete any files in user profile. It is more likely that your user profile in Windows 10 got damaged during BSOD along with Steam and Factorio data.
It is likely that you have just logged in with a temporary profile or your system has created a new one if a registry data about the older one was lost.
Try to navigate to C:\Users folder and see what folders are there. Navigate to your %appdata% folder, click on address bar and see what exact path it will show and compare this to the user profile list found in C:\Users.
I think there is a great possibility that old profile is still there with your settings and saves. However you should definitely check out problems with profiles so that this issue does not repeat itself.
Be aware that BSOD is pretty rare and in most cases is caused by hardware failure or corrupt drivers so try to diagnose that and fix asap.

Thanks for the response.

Unfortunately, I don't see evidence of any new profile. All other folders within the existing profile are intact, and the only one which lost all its content was the Factorio folder. You assert that Factorio does not ever delete any files; how can you be sure? It seems at least possible the a new installation might clear the folder. If indeed the setup routine does that (either directly, or through a Steam service), it would have been nicer for the existing folder to be renamed before the new one was setup.

You're right that BSOD is rare, and I've experienced them more frequently recently, so I can't rule out some component moving into a failure territory. It's just hard to identify, though I suspect memory is probably to blame as the error mentioned paging. That said, the machine had been up for 6 days running, and failed during this startup of Factorio, even though I'd opened and closed Factorio multiple times in the same up-time. I don't suspect Factorio alone was to blame. I'm mostly just a little frustrated that I lost my saves. This won't happen again though as I've set up the Factorio folder to sync to another machine from this point forward.

Thanks again.

Hmm, would some file recovery software like Recuva or something work? It does sound like it could be your hard drive's fault, although I don't know if Factorio deletes saves during a re-install.

SpoonUnit wrote: This won't happen again though as I've set up the Factorio folder to sync to another machine from this point forward.

Be careful with sync feature as it might sync the fact the folder is empty to the second machine so you better set some backup instead which as opposed to sync does not delete content on other end in case it is deleted from the source.

Thanks for considering that. I've tested this now specifically, and it looks like Resilio Sync actually keep a backup of all deleted files too. This means every time the game autosaves, you end up with more and more save files in the target backup location, whereas the original Factorio location only has the latest file variant. This creates a deletion job at the target, but I'm more willing to have a delete job than a total loss.