A Cautionary tale about saves and crashes

[p1t1o]

tl;dr - periodically empty your save folder!

SO Im 10 game-yars into a career. Its the big one, the one I've been waiting for since V0.22. KSP is finally complete and stable enough, and my computer sufficient to support the modload I need to create a KSP build that I perceive as 100% feature-complete.

I switch vessels, game locks up, computer crashed. No biggie, happens every now and then, its frustrating, but you put up with it if you want to run 200+mods, plus my computer crashes randomly every week or so.

Re-Load. Savegame corrupted, unable to load career. 

Ah well, switch to an earlier save, lost 3 hours, not too bad.

Rename earlier save to "persistant".

Save loads but any scene containing a part runs terribly slow, 1-2FPS. Eg: go into VAB, everything fine, click initial part, slows down to 1-2FPS.

Is my whole career borked?

Start new test career, no problems.

Try removing some of the more troublesome mods - dont expect much success as game ran fine for several hours before crashing.

Tinker with a few more things but long story short - I clean out the save folder, leaving just the persistant file in place (the earlier save that I renamed above).

Boom, fixed. Why, I have no idea, but there you go.

 

Lesson - apparently, if you leave your save folder to get too bloated, you are at risk of a save-corrupting crash. 

So de-bloat it occasionally but more importantly SAVE OFTEN and BACK UP!!

[The Aziz]

I do that regularly but the reason is quite different. When I go Alt+F9 to load chosen save file, with 50+ of them in a folder, it takes a while to load them all.

Never had any problems with performance except that.

[katateochi]

What bloat do you get in your save folder? Copies of save files? I only ever have the two .sfs files; persistent and quicksave.  But I have other stuff; save specific mod settings (Remote Tech, Craft Manger) and a text file of some notes. But I do also have a .git folder (which is a couple hundred files).  I've never had any issues having that or another other gunk in the save folder.

Rather than making manual save copies or the in game alt-f9 method, I highly recommend using a version control (VC) tool to handle keeping the history of both save and craft files.  I've been using GIT for KSP for years, and it's never caused a problem. The advantages are;
- it keeps track of the order of things, you don't have to name saves with a version or whatever to keep track of their order.
- KSP just ignores the git folder, so as far as KSP is concerned there is one save file to worry about/parse/load into memory (given KSP's general approach of loading everything into RAM I wouldn't be surprised if it just loads every .sfs file, even if it doesn't need it...and given OP's experience that might be what was causing things to stop working).
- Space. ok not much of a problem in these days of terabyte HDs, but my current career save is 14mb,  so keeping a bunch of copies of that starts to mount up. My git folder is ~70mb right now and that contains every "backup" of both quicksave and persistent files (600+ versions) going right back to the start of the career AND every version of every craft.....way more space efficient. 
- git (and I'm sure other VC tools) is designed to be pushed and pulled, so porting a save to another location/machine is easy (ok copy paste is easy too, but this is easier), and fast (only changed content is moved).
Disadvantage: you need to know git (or whatever VC tool you choose), which can be a bit odd initially, but using git for KSP purposes only needs the most basic level of git understanding. (I could do a post on how to setup and use git for KSP if folk are interested). 

[p1t1o]

20 hours ago, katateochi said:

What bloat do you get in your save folder? Copies of save files? I only ever have the two .sfs files; persistent and quicksave.  But I have other stuff; save specific mod settings (Remote Tech, Craft Manger) and a text file of some notes. But I do also have a .git folder (which is a couple hundred files).  I've never had any issues having that or another other gunk in the save folder.

Admittedly, some mods I have do generate extra save files, Kerbal Alarm Clock is a particular offender.

Also various manual saves etc.

And my current save files are 10MB and growing.

I think the folder was maybe a couple hundred meg when I cleaned it? I never actually checked.

 

I dont know why the size of the save folder is an issue, or if it only looks t save files or the whole contents, I only know that I had a really bad issue and (after trying several other things first) I had a hunch and cleaning out the folder completely fixed it.