Any way of recovering an overwritten game state?

[Rusty6899]

I had a bit of a mare today. I have been playing without quick saves. All was going well, I had landed on Duna, taken a surface sample, planted a flag etc. and returned to my ship. I then noticed that I hadn't repacked my parachutes, so I got back out my craft and repacked all of them bar two, which I seemingly couldn't reach from the ladder. I then pressed the spacebar to drop down so that I could walk round and pack the remaining parachutes, when the screen went black, I heard an explosion and a message came up on the screen saying that my ship was destroyed along with my Kerbal.

Feeling cheated, I attempted to reload the persistent file, because I thought that might take me back to before the crash, however as the screen was still black (even back at the space centre, although with the mission icons/cash/rep bars still were displayed) I couldn't tell whether I had loaded from before or after the crash. I then reloaded my most recent save (as I can still save the game from the space centre screen) which was from ages before.

As soon as I loaded the game, I saw the auto-save message, and realised that my persistent file was now the one from much earlier, meaning that I had lost hours of progress.

Frustratingly I still have craft files from my most recent missions, but can't use them because I haven't researched the required parts.

Is there any way of overcoming this and getting my progress back, or will I have to grind all that science back?

Please excuse any misuse of terminology, or any incoherence that may have crept in to my description.

[Sirrobert]

There is no way to get your old save back without quicksaves.

But you can manually fix the state, with a little cheating.

Open the persistance file with notepad (KSP->saves->"name of your save"->persistent.sfs). There is a line there that records how much science you have (sci = "number of science you have") Edit that number to the amount of science you want/need to have to fix it. Save file, and load it.

You can also manually place back your rockets with Hyperedit. You can always deleted it after you're done if you don't want to use it

[Bean]

To avoid this in future, you may want to check out Jebretary