Factorio Forums

I was playing a few hours ago, played for several hours, saved the game several times. Now a few hours later I turn on my PC again, and the saves are no longer there. For some reason, they're a day or two old. This applies even to the autosaves.

Anything I can do to fix this?

Saves reverting back somehow is, needless to say, a major problem. This hasn't happened before though.

I play on the newest experimental on Steam. No mods.

So, the saves folder is empty or you just don't see them in game?
The log is from 0.18.15 and shows you loading a save just fine.

Yes but the save is quite outdated. Yes and no, there are saves in the folder, the relevant saves are not, only old saves.

I guess it's 0.18.15 as it was running just about when the patch was released.

Do you use Steam cloud sync? I disabled it for Factorio years ago, mostly because the massive bandwidth load for large Factorio saves was annoying, but also because I vaguely remember that the last straw was losing some saved games when some situation or other with multiple PCs caused the wrong things to get synced. I started using a separate cloud sync service instead that I could set a bandwidth limit on.

I guess it's on, but I was never asked anything. I had a message after closing the game that some syncing hadn't succeeded or something. The cloud saves don't have my up-to-date saves though, nor does my local PC, or if they are there they're not in the saves folder. And I never got to choose...

So is it an issue with Steam, or with the game?

MEOWMI wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 25, 2020 10:37 pm

I guess it's on, but I was never asked anything. I had a message after closing the game that some syncing hadn't succeeded or something. The cloud saves don't have my up-to-date saves though, nor does my local PC, or if they are there they're not in the saves folder. And I never got to choose...

So is it an issue with Steam, or with the game?

Steam sync does sometimes ask what you want to happen when it detects that the save it's intending to to overwrite is newer than the save in the cloud, but whatever logic it has, it's not foolproof, and I'm 93% certain that it screwed over my saves that one time, with the other 7% representing my uncertainty that I didn't absent-mindedly do something to make it happen myself.

So I wrote it off as an issue with Steam's syncing. Turned it off, sorted out my own back-ups, haven't looked back. I don't think game makers have any control over how the sync works, you can opt your game in or not, that's it.

I don't actually know if this is what happened to you but from what you've said here, it sounds similar.

Did you even ever change the standard file location (%appdata% on windows) by changing config.ini?
EDIT: Sorry, just saw my typo.

I have not changed the location, it does use %appdata%.

As for Steam, I have looked at some of the Steam logs too, and if it isn't a fault of Factorio, it is 100% a fault of Steam. There was no warning when I started the game, only when I exited it was there anything. Not the first game cloud sync has caused issues with. I hope there's a way to just turn it off forever, doesn't seem worth it at all.

MEOWMI wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 26, 2020 7:23 am

I have not changed the location, it does use %appdata%.

As for Steam, I have looked at some of the Steam logs too, and if it isn't a fault of Factorio, it is 100% a fault of Steam. There was no warning when I started the game, only when I exited it was there anything. Not the first game cloud sync has caused issues with. I hope there's a way to just turn it off forever, doesn't seem worth it at all.

Library > Factorio > Properties ... > Updates > Steam Cloud


Don't forget to sort out some other back-up. I use a popular free cloud service that points at the save folder, with the bandwidth throttled, I don't recommend them so I'm not going to say which one, but there are many available.