Protect against progress loss by loading old quicksave.

[cantab]

Yet another player has lost days of progress in KSP simply by loading an old quicksave. As has been discussed KSP is quick to overwrite the persistent file in such scenarios.

It's all very well to say the player should make backups, but people don't, and frankly KSP is giving us the rope to hang ourselves here. I feel it should be reasonably straightforward for KSP to give some protection for the player against this.

One very simple approach would be to make a copy of the persistent.sfs when quickloading, call it before_quickload.sfs or something. There are countless other ways it could be done that would be better than how things currently behave.

[Snark]

Or for that matter, just make it so that the auto-save functionality doesn't simply overwrite persistent.sfs. Do that, but also write to a save whose name starts with "auto-save" and then has a timestamp. The game would keep some number of these (say, 5)/and delete the oldest one when they fill up. The number of kept auto-saves would be adjustable via KSP settings.

There are mods to do that sort of thing now-- should just be stock.

[pandaman]

It's not been a big issue for me (yet) but I agree something like this should be stock.

[Nothalogh]

Yet another player has lost days of progress in KSP simply by loading an old quicksave. As has been discussed KSP is quick to overwrite the persistent file in such scenarios.

It's all very well to say the player should make backups, but people don't, and frankly KSP is giving us the rope to hang ourselves here. I feel it should be reasonably straightforward for KSP to give some protection for the player against this.

One very simple approach would be to make a copy of the persistent.sfs when quickloading, call it before_quickload.sfs or something. There are countless other ways it could be done that would be better than how things currently behave.

Yes, the auto and quicksave functionality in KSP is atrocious

[fireblade274]

yep I lost a good 4 hours by pressing F9 instead of F5 before. It sucked.

[KerbMav]

Just enable the loading menu as a standard. The one now opened with ctrl-F9 to load a named save previously saved with ctrl-F5 - just make it that F9 also opens this menu, no automatic reload.

[Guest]

The problem is not with the reload. The problem is with the auto-save that occurs shortly after the reload. cantab's idea sounds like the simplest solution to the problem IMO.

[Not a Cylon]

YES. I just got nearly apoplectic over this, and I lost maybe a few hours. Any more and I'd be done with the game. This is basic, basic stuff; a 1.0 release should not eat people's saves. I just left a negative Steam review for this alone. (It's a little more satisfying to one-star something, I've gotta say.)

Why not warn when loading the quicksave would revert more than the current mission? Or overwrite the quicksave at launch? I have never seen a game where quickload could ever go farther back than "restart level" or the equivalent. That's simply not what quickload means.

(As for making backups, if players are backing up their saves to avoid accidents, the game is doing something horribly wrong. And the best that could do is limit the damage to the last backup.)