All is lost. Woe is me.

[dr_jt]

I'm on holiday for the week so this morning I decided to get some quality KSP time in. The dog wanted to go for a walk so I quit KSP and took the dog out and ended up going to the store. A few hours later I sat down for some more quality KSP time and my saved game wouldn't load. All my hard earned science and unlocked parts gone. Gone I tell ya. Gone. Woe is me. Back to square one am I.

Has this happen to any one else with the newest version?

[-RanZ-]

make backups of your save folder

[The Destroyer]

How would it not load? Press alt+f2 tell me what it says when you click.

[User Unrelated]

make backups of your save folder

this x5

I back mine up before every session.

I even back them up ocasionally on dropbox in case something happens to my laptop

[DeathFromBelow]

I've had the persistence file get corrupted once, swapping it out with my last quicksave got things back up and running with minimal loss of progress.

[Keithz15]

If you want a "cheat" to get back you could just edit your science amount and unlock what you had unlocked then edit your science back to 0.

[numerobis]

When you say you quit KSP, you just quit the application, or you carefully went back to the space center, clicked on the exit arrow, and so on?

I notice that apple-Q just kills the app without saving on OSX, and I presume the equivalent behaviour holds on other platforms. That's usually a feature for me -- speeds up the loop when developing plugins -- but it would be annoying if I did that at an inopportune time...

[dr_jt]

I don't ever do quick saves. (Well almost never. I'll do one just before I add a mod just in case something goes wrong. There was a quick save from Nov, 6th.)

I quit out of the program properly.

Anyway.......

I think I know what happen. I loaded up my saved game but the kettle started to go off so I left to tend to it. One of my cats was sitting on my desk watching me. When the cat heard me in the kitchen he came running to beg for food. I think he may have run across my keyboard and hit F9 loading that old quick save which I made when I added the KAS mod earlier this month. He must have also hit the "Windows" key which is why it was sitting on the desktop and not in KSP. Which made it look like a crash of some type. When I properly exited the game it saved that old quick save as the current save.

So I don't think it is a KSP problem like I first thought. I'm now pretty sure it was a cat problem.

Per the suggestion of Keithz15 I edited the science amount and unlocked all that I had unlocked before the CATastrophe . I was even a good boy and didn't unlock anything I didn't have unlocked before. Although I was tempted with a couple of earlier aircraft tech levels I skipped over because I don't really do aircraft.

[Keithz15]

Very nice! Im hoping they make space planes a little more efficient and a little easier to make in .23 i saw some hints in the dev notes towards sabre engines. Exciting!!

[0jam3290]

I think he may have run across my keyboard and hit F9 loading that old quick save which I made when I added the KAS mod earlier this month.

You do know that you have to hold down F9 for a second or two before it actually loads. That said, it's unlikely it was your cat unless your cat was laying on the key.

[dr_jt]

You do know that you have to hold down F9 for a second or two before it actually loads. That said, it's unlikely it was your cat unless your cat was laying on the key.

He may have been standing on it. He has done it before. Sometimes I think he likes to make it beep.

[little square dot]

He may have been standing on it. He has done it before. Sometimes I think he likes to make it beep.

I don't know man... I had my career lock up on me because a .craft file was corrupted somehow when I saved it.

Of course the game doesn't tell you when this is the problem, rather it simply makes your saved games disappear while the debugger says "object instance not set to an instance of an object", or something to that effect.

[numerobis]

You do know that you have to hold down F9 for a second or two before it actually loads. That said, it's unlikely it was your cat unless your cat was laying on the key.

Mine often run, then pause with paws on the keyboard, then run off again. Or they sleep on the keyboard (it's a laptop, so the keyboard is warm). Beeping seems not to faze my cats at all.

[Ringkeeper]

I don't know man... I had my career lock up on me because a .craft file was corrupted somehow when I saved it.

Of course the game doesn't tell you when this is the problem, rather it simply makes your saved games disappear while the debugger says "object instance not set to an instance of an object", or something to that effect.

the same stuff happens to me alot. Specially when i use the assembley saves. But it is easy to figure out... you cant load subassemblys or complete crafts? One is broken, have fun finding it ...

[WooDzor]

I've thrown the cat through the living room a couple of times for the same reason.

'oh so you're almost in orbit.. Let me sit on your space bar and quickly go through all your carefully set up staging'

WRAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!KSP not cat proof, at all :-/

[Rakshasa]

>crontab -l

1 18 * * * /Users/rakshasa/personal/scripts/push_git.sh

Safe with no hassle.

[kahlzun]

>crontab -l

1 18 * * * /Users/rakshasa/personal/scripts/push_git.sh

Safe with no hassle.

......This is.. What?

[dr_jt]

I don't know man... I had my career lock up on me because a .craft file was corrupted somehow when I saved it.

Of course the game doesn't tell you when this is the problem, rather it simply makes your saved games disappear while the debugger says "object instance not set to an instance of an object", or something to that effect.

Maybe it was that. I was getting some random crashes that I traced to the cardboard and duct tape mod. I didn't have any of those parts in my career save but I did in one of my sandbox saves. On restart not only was my career save gone but also the sandbox saves. I've since removed that mod but only time will tell if it was truly causing the crashes. I still think it was the cat standing on the keyboard.

[dr_jt]

Mine often run, then pause with paws on the keyboard, then run off again. Or they sleep on the keyboard (it's a laptop, so the keyboard is warm). Beeping seems not to faze my cats at all.

The cats sleep om my wife's laptop. She hates it because they have messed up some of her client files and one time it shutdown from over heating. Way back in the old days of vacuum tube TVs many a TV was ruined because of cats sleeping on cooling vents and making the TV overheat. I started out as a TV repairman, yes I'm that old, and I use to have to tell people to keep the cats off of the top vents of the TVs because it was bad for the TV tubes.

[Torham234]

Its very likely that KSP will still have several save breaking updates before version 1.0, so you haven't really lost that much.

[Rakshasa]

......This is.. What?

A simple crontab job on my MBP that automatically commits and pushes all the changes to my personal (personal/job related notes, etc) and KSP save directory to github.com every day at 18:00. Even if github.com was to get hit by an asteroid my local machine _and_ my rented server (which pulls my repostiories from github) have the whole history of the save files as committed every day.

One of the joys of UNIX-based systems; everything you might want to do as a user was solved 3 decades ago.

If you got a a mac os x, make the root or specific save directory a github repository (see website) and create (executable with 'chmod a+x push_git.sh');

#!/bin/bash

cd /Applications/Games/KSP/saves/ksp && git add . && git commit -m "Updated `date`." && git push

Now good luck with the vi editor you get when you type 'crontab -e'.

Edited November 28, 2013 by Rakshasa

[Barefoot Friar]

This is why I hate cats. That and their propensity to attack me when I'm concentrating on something.