[Switch2] Game crashed and deleted my recent save

[Edgeworth]

I have been playing Factorio base game on the Switch 2.

The game suddenly crashed and software had to close. When I restarted the game and went to load my save it had deleted the previous 7 or so saves and I lost about a day’s worth of progress.

Is there a way to get my saves back?

[Loewchen]

A crash would not affect existing save files. With a NSO subscription there would be a cloud backup of your save files.

[Edgeworth]

A crash would not affect existing save files. With a NSO subscription there would be a cloud backup of your save files.

Unfortunately the NSO back up was a day old so it didn’t restore the newer saves.

Seems like they’re gone for good.

The file loss might not have been caused by the crash, it might have instigated the crash. I was close to maxing out the storage space the game allocates for save data. Perhaps an auto save pushed it over the edge. I still wouldn’t expect save data to be deleted in that circumstance but it’s the only thing I can think of.

[Edgeworth]

So this happened yet again. It’s definitely something to do with the save storage getting maxed out or close to maxed out.

Anyone playing on the Switch 2, be sure to delete your save files down. The game says it allocates 1GB for saves, but I’ve lost save data on two occasions maxing that out.

Sigh. That’s 6 hours down the drain.

[Twinsen]

It is in fact possible for saving to stop working and be reverted due to how saving is implemented, sorry for the trouble.

I have fixed something related to this recently. When receiving an error(no crash) that the game could not be saved due to full storage, all subsequent saves would stop being committed to storage and eventually the game would crash, losing all saves from when the error was shown.

If you can remember the exact steps and other details: amount of used storage shown in game out of 1GB, failed saves, errors, save sizes(do you have saves over 100MB?). This would help me confirm this is in fact fixed.

Unfortunately the release is at least 4 weeks away due to the complicated release process but as long as you never reach the 1GB limit you should be ok.

[Edgeworth]

It is in fact possible for saving to stop working and be reverted due to how saving is implemented, sorry for the trouble.

I have fixed something related to this recently. When receiving an error(no crash) that the game could not be saved due to full storage, all subsequent saves would stop being committed to storage and eventually the game would crash, losing all saves from when the error was shown.

If you can remember the exact steps and other details: amount of used storage shown in game out of 1GB, failed saves, errors, save sizes(do you have saves over 100MB?). This would help me confirm this is in fact fixed.

Unfortunately the release is at least 4 weeks away due to the complicated release process but as long as you never reach the 1GB limit you should be ok.

It’s happened again this morning, although this time it happened about 20 minutes after I’d deleted my save data down to under 500MB. I assumed the crash occurred previously because I was at the threshold of maxing out the storage limit. But that wasn’t the case this time. My saves are 12MB each.

It seems to revert the save data back to the state of the latest upload to NSO cloud, and anything after that point is lost.

[Twinsen]

Try restarting the game after deleting some save files as this will commit the deletions to storage.
In general restarting the game should clear the broken internal state and will help you confirm the state of your save files.