Load an autosaved game from earlier?

[Valkyria90]

I am currently on a manned mission to Duna, and have spent several hours getting the vessel im flying docked together from several launchs, and was finally on my way to Duna, when i midway in flight accidently press "space", the thing collapses, and the mission is a failure

Is there any way for me to return to an earlier stage of the flight? Prefferably to when my third and final part of the ship docked, and i can start the flight over again with all my fuel etc ?

I seriously hope there is a way

I am running the game unmodded. Perhaps there is a mod i can install that gives me automatic save points i can return to, to prevent future failures?

[Apollo13]

If you didn't do a QuickSave, then there is no return to previous version.

[Tiron]

There are only two saves: the 'Autosave' (Persistent.sfs) and the Quicksave (Quicksave.sfs). Both are automatically overwritten when a new one is made. Quicksaves are only made when you press F5, and only loaded by holding F9 (which WILL overwrite your autosave, so be careful.)

If you're on a new enough version of windows and supremely lucky, you might be able to recover an older version of one or both of them using the 'previous versions' feature. To do this, you need to navigate to <KSP Root>\saves\<Save Name>, right click on the file, hit properties, and then go to the 'previous versions' tab. It will take a few seconds to bring up any results, as it searches through system restore points and any windows backups you've made for older versions of the file.

In your situation this probably isn't going to help much, because even if you're very lucky the most recent you're likely to find is one from yesterday.

[Gus]

Also, if you ever want to save a quicksave permanently, just rename the "quicksave.sfs" file. Later on, you can just rename it back to "quicksave.sfs" and then hit F9 to reload it.

Edit: sorry I meant F9

Edited September 13, 2013 by Gus

[Kasuha]

Also, if you ever want to save a quicksave permanently, just rename the "quicksave.sfs" file. Later on, you can just rename it back to "quicksave.sfs" and then hit F11 to reload it.

Oh I didn't know it's possible to load the autosave using F11, now that's useful!

Apart of it I had to discover that just holding F9 is not enough to load the quicksave on my machine. I need to press it, release, then press and hold.

[SRV Ron]

A bit of work, but you can pause the game after the quick save, get into Windows, copy the quick save file to another location and rename it, and return to the game via its icon on the tray at the bottom of the window. You can then do that as many times as you want by just making a note of the time and what you were doing. The time date stamp of the file will help you in locating which quick save you need to return to a particular state you want to go back to.

[maltesh]

Personally, I symlink my Saves directory to my Dropbox folder, so it automatically uploads after each upload. Initially I did this so I could play the same game across two different computers, and automatically upload screenshots but a consequence of doing so means that Dropbox has a copy of every change in the persistence files in my KSP game over the last 30 days.So if something goes terribly, horribly wrong, I just have to find the timestamp from before things went Terribly, Horribly Wrong, and revert to that version.