Have autosave take backups of previous saves

[Artorp]

Hi guys.

Most of us can relate to this: You do a lot of science in an area, or you do a stressful landing, and are now on your way home. And then something happens and you need to resort to an older save. Maybe you timewarped through the core of Kerbin? Maybe Kraken ate you? And when's the last time you saved? If you usually don't rely on the quicksave function it can be quite a while ago. Or maybe you're new to the game and haven't used it yet. And if you do decide to quickload the helpful autosave function will kick in and save at first opportunity.

My proposal to save a lot of headache and frustration is to keep a few of the older persistent.sfs around. Before it overwrites persistent.sfs have it rename the older one to persistent.sfs2, and if that file exist rename that to persistent.sfs3. Two or three backups should be enough. To illustrate this, this is what the save folder looks like now:

Ships
Subassemblies
persistent.sfs
quicksave.sfs

With an automated backup system it would look like this:

Ships
Subassemblies
persistent.sfs
persistent.sfs2
persistent.sfs3
quicksave.sfs

I know many of you value the way KSP rewards good planning and punishes bad plays, I do too! You sent an unmanned ship to Duna without power generation? Sucks to be you. You sent a ship to Moho but used too much ∆V during the insertion? Better send a rescue party or plan another way home. My suggestion won't counteract that but rather serve as a much needed last resort safety net when you do sit there and wonder if your last two hours of gameplay truly is lost.

As a sidenote, if anyone knows of a mod or even a third party program that does something similar without cluttering up the savefolder I'd love to hear about it.