Lost 250hr (approx) career save

[Kearla]

So, yes. It happened. After playing Kerbal for a long time and having a very good career save, it unfortunately got corrupt. I tried to restore the file, searching on google and so on, but with no luck. So now i have deleted my best career save which sucks. But i have to say, i do feel a bit better. Maybe it's me knowing there will be a new journey in the future. Who knows?
Have you ever tried something like this, please leave a little response below

[Swacer]

I just posted in the PS4 section how mine was corrupted at about 10-15 hrs.  That's a shame to see 250hrs just disappear...you have my sympathies

Edited July 26, 2016 by Swacer

[The_Rocketeer]

@Kearla did you rescue your craft designs from the save folder? Every ship is saved in it's own file, so while u lose the 'game progress' if corruption happens, you don't have to lose all your time in the editor - that only happens when a major update is release :-p

I used to have problems (years ago) with the editor corrupting particular vessels, but I've never had the whole save spontaneously go bye-byes.

Edit: ah... PS4 would not be aided by my above suggestion

Edited July 26, 2016 by The_Rocketeer

[Kearla]

9 minutes ago, The_Rocketeer said:

@Kearla did you rescue your craft designs from the save folder? Every ship is saved in it's own file, so while u lose the 'game progress' if corruption happens, you don't have to lose all your time in the editor - that only happens when a major update is release :-p

Yes, i did save my spacecraft  

[Snark]

27 minutes ago, Kearla said:

After playing Kerbal for a long time and having a very good career save, it unfortunately got corrupt. I tried to restore the file, searching on google and so on, but with no luck. So now i have deleted my best career save which sucks.

Really sorry to hear that.

A couple of things to be aware of:

If you're new to KSP, you may not be aware that you can save the game.  Not just a quicksave by hitting F5 (most people find out about that pretty quick), but you can make a named save by pressing Alt+F5.  I do this all the time to make convenient multiple "checkpoints" that I can revert to later in case of mishap.  The reason to do so is generally "just in case I later discover that I've done something dumb" rather than "just in case the game has a bug"

However, if you are in the habit of making named saves, this also has the beneficial side effect of protecting you from corrupted careers.  If you find yourself in a position where your career is corrupted, you can just do this:

1. Exit KSP, just to be on the safe side.
2. Go to your career's subfolder within the "saves" folder.
3. You will see a "persistent.sfs" (this is the main save that gets loaded when you load the game), and various other files named .sfs (these are your named saves).
4. Copy the persistent.sfs file to some safe location, so you have a backup copy in case you mess something up.
5. Pick one of the other .sfs files (the most recent one is a good bet), and copy it inside the folder.  Rename the copy to persistent.sfs.
6. Start KSP and load up your career.

When you do that, the game will start you at the KSC as per usual, with the game state at whatever it was when you made the save.  Since you made that save file (presumably) when your game was still in a good state, before whatever-it-was caused your game to get corrupted, then it ought to fix the problem and recover your career (though of course you'll lose any progress that happened after you made the save).

[Swacer]

Does anyone know if you can take a save file for a PS4, and copy it to an external HD?

 

[mk1980]

it is certainly disheartening to lose a long career, especially if you lose it to some technical problem and not because you did something wrong in the game.

but starting from scratch can be refreshing. if the other career was your first serious career, you probably learned quite a few things. with a new career, you have the opportunity to use your new knowledge to do things differently.

when i played my first career, i was a complete noob. i learned lots of basic stuff but also quite some more advances skills as i played (like docking or interplanetary transfers, or how to design viable SSTO spaceplanes). with that knowledge under my belt, the next career looked quite different. instead of doing the boring science grind at the space center and later at the mun and minmus, i basically set the goals higher. went to duna right after my first landings on mun and minmus, built space stations with reusable SSTO supply planes, built outposts on the moons etc. before i even unlocked the last upgrade of the research building.

in retrospect, the second career was just as much fun as the first one. see it as an opportunity.

but it can't hurt to make a few backups like Snark explained. always a good idea to backup important data, even if it's just a video game. you still put in a lot of effort to get the game to that point.

[Kermanzooming]

1 hour ago, Kearla said:

So, yes. It happened. After playing Kerbal for a long time and having a very good career save, it unfortunately got corrupt.

Wow sorry to hear that but congratulations on seeing the opportunity in it, instead of just the negative side. That attitude will take you far away in life... And in KSP.

[MaxwellsDemon]

I regularly save my campaign games as "Y02D222save", for saving on the date Year 2, Day 222... then I have an indicator how far back it is in in-game time if I need to restore to an earlier state.

[magnemoe]

19 minutes ago, MaxwellsDemon said:

I regularly save my campaign games as "Y02D222save", for saving on the date Year 2, Day 222... then I have an indicator how far back it is in in-game time if I need to restore to an earlier state.

yes its an very good idea do do hard saves of any game from time to time. 
An good practice to do then starting the game up again.

[Ten Key]

1 hour ago, Swacer said:

Does anyone know if you can take a save file for a PS4, and copy it to an external HD?

Yes, you should be able to copy your KSP save game to a USB device.

http://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/data_system.html

[Swacer]

Any idea on the size of the save file?

[Ten Key]

My save file is about 50 MB, but I'm running KSP on a PC and most of that is from all the ship designs I have cluttering up my VAB. The persistence file (the part that records the career state and any ship currently in flight) is around 5 MB. 

[DD_bwest]

3 hours ago, Swacer said:

Any idea on the size of the save file?

i have a ksp save on a usb drive thats around 11mb.   but im sure they vary greatly depending on how many ships are in space, and ships saved in the VAB.   the save only has a few in space and a few saved ships

Edited July 26, 2016 by DD_bwest

[ag3nt108]

Wow, I'm sorry to hear that.  The good news is you can take a fresh approach

[samstarman5]

It probably won't hurt to make a backup after set milestones. Maybe not as early as achieving orbit, but landing on the Mun definitely warrants a backup save and so on.

[jwbrase]

In addition to all the things mentioned above, I run a daily, full-system, incremental backup on my computer, and it's saved my butt KSP-wise multiple times, including from having had KSP update before I'd had a chance to duplicate the folder for the old version. Getting a routine automatic backup set up is a fair bit of work, but once you've got it going it's fairly painless and can turn a potential major crisis into a minor hiccup.

[Curveball Anders]

Since I'm professionally paranoid and a sceptic old cynic (with an old experience as sysadmin) I have a little script that I've added to auto-run.

It copies 'important' folders (including saves and setting from my favourite games) to my file-server.

And on the file-server there's a cron job that optimizes the backed up data and trims off old crud.

I can say that I haven't unintentionally lost any important data older than a day for the last 25-30 years.

(With exception for a number of stupid and/or drunken incidents of rage over misbehaving software )

 

[jlcarneiro]

Sorry to hear that!

I suggest something like S.A.V.E.. I has helped me sometimes...

[Superfluous J]

Most every career I've ever put any amount of time into has ended because they just kept getting harder and harder to play. I don't think I've ever had an unplayable save (like, unloadable) but it always got to the point where I was spending more time fixing problems than flying space ships.

I've restarted career dozens of times. For me, that's just part of the game.

[Nansuchao]

Every new KSP version I start a new Science game. Every time I go for a complete while semi-realistic coonization of the system, with the help of "some" mods. Every time, before I can fully unlock the tech tree, two thing will surely happen:

- a new KSP version, so I have to reinstall everything from scratch and begin a new save,

-or the save begin to show some terrible issues that force me to stop the game, reinstall everything from scratch and restart.

This routine goes on from KSP 0.23 and just yesterday I had to delete my Very Important Save cause all of my crewed ships completely disappeared from the game with no reason at all.

So yes, it's not something new for many of us. Next time I can try other mods, hopefully with a more stable version of KSP.

[Majorjim!]

On 07/26/2016 at 2:33 PM, Kearla said:

Yes, i did save my spacecraft  

That's good, so I assume you are playing on PC. Firstly ouch. I have had only one or two corrupted craft files, and ZERO corrupted saves on PC and that was a OLD version for the craft files.

At least you can save your spacecraft when on PC. Not so much luck on console sadly..

Also mods this should be in the PC support forums, @sal_vager?

On 07/26/2016 at 2:13 PM, Kearla said:

Have you ever tried something like this, please leave a little response below

Have we ever tried what? My spider senses are tingling over this OP.

Edited July 28, 2016 by Majorjim