[2021] Can I get an F?

Originally posted by 【イサク】: Just bought this game a few days ago and put 21 hours into a world. Everything was going great, learning and figuring things out. made great progress got to tier 3 trader and it was like day 17 or something. Suddenly a thunder storm came in irl and i thought it was cool until my power went out for an hour or so.

I was under the assumption this game has autosaves or something like most modern and reasonable games do. To my surprise it doesn't and only saves when you manually do it essentially. To my even more tragic surprise this game has horrible player and world lose issues for some dumb dev decisions I assume. 20 hours instantly down the drain.

It being a thing in the community to always make backups is kind of a sad thing considering you will never know about this until you find out if happened to someone or yourself. R.I.P my fun. Not allowed to have nice things I guess.

1: F
2: There's a potential fix for corrupted saves here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/251570/discussions/1/3110269850346164483/#c3110269850346113858
3: It's the opposite actually; The game is fairly well constantly writing to disk during your gameplay; Every thing you do is saved as you do it. Functionally speaking, It is always auto-saving 'like most modern games' as you put it.
4: Because the game is constantly saving, Any kind of sudden power loss = corrupted save. This is the exact reason why pretty much any game with an autosave will warn you "Do not turn off the power while this symbol is present"; In 7DTD, that symbol being present is the default state.
5: There is no cloud for the game because the saves are too large; Most games nowadays get around save corruption issues using the cloud, which isn't an option here due to the size of the save+world combo exceeding the maximum limit allowed by steam cloud per user.

Hopefully #2 can help you out. Always sucks to lose a bunch of progress :(

Originally posted by Midas: Maybe the game should have a backup save copy that updates less regularly, like every 15-min or half an hour or something.

Ever played Valheim? You know that way your game freezes for several seconds every 20 minutes when it autosaves?

Now imagine that but worse.

There's a reason 7DTD saves constantly instead of periodically.

Now, I agree, some kindof backup would be nice; Maybe a button in the menu to make a SINGLE manual save (because again, save size is not small, and most users wouldn't think about it and would save like any other game with manual saves, most of which have saves ranging in the area of 10-20mb instead of 1gb+; Plus the whole 'save scumming' thing.) or something, iuno.

Originally posted by Midas:

Originally posted by Shurenai: Ever played Valheim? You know that way your game freezes for several seconds every 20 minutes when it autosaves?

Now imagine that but worse.

There's a reason 7DTD saves constantly instead of periodically.

Now, I agree, some kindof backup would be nice; Maybe a button in the menu to make a SINGLE manual save (because again, save size is not small, and most users wouldn't think about it and would save like any other game with manual saves, most of which have saves ranging in the area of 10-20mb instead of 1gb+; Plus the whole 'save scumming' thing.) or something, iuno.

If it's saving on the fly, though, wouldn't it only need to make whatever changes occurred since the last update? Not sure how much data changes reflect the size of the save file itself, but if it's updating the 'live' save in real time, and then updating the backup save every half hour or so with just the difference since the last update, I would assume that would only reflect a fraction of the overall save size.

I think you misunderstand. It's not saving "since the last update". It's actively writing data to multiple save files as changes happen. Data is being loaded and unloaded constantly. There are separate files for your character, your explored world, the map section you are in, vehicles, electricity, world time data, world statistics, and information on all other game-related times like forges, traders, respawns, ect.

This isn't like most other games that only have a few megabytes of data stored in RAM to save up changes and write them to a disk. 7 Days is working with literal Gigabytes of information constantly.

Originally posted by Midas:

Originally posted by SylenThunder: I think you misunderstand. It's not saving "since the last update". It's actively writing data to multiple save files as changes happen. Data is being loaded and unloaded constantly. There are separate files for your character, your explored world, the map section you are in, vehicles, electricity, world time data, world statistics, and information on all other game-related times like forges, traders, respawns, ect.

This isn't like most other games that only have a few megabytes of data stored in RAM to save up changes and write them to a disk. 7 Days is working with literal Gigabytes of information constantly.

No, I get that. I'm asking if it would be possible to have a second save as a backup that is only being updated with the current state of the active save file every so often.

Like the actual save is tracking everything that changes, that the player moved from A, to B, to C, to D. Whereas the backup save just updates that the player was at A last cycle, and is now at D.

yes you can do this manually. If you want something more automated I recommend Duplicati as it is capable of making live incremental backups while you are playing if you want. Very few programs are capable of this on Windows. (Is a standard feature of Linux, go figure)

Just keep in mind that your saves plus relevant map data can be gigabytes in size. Doing hard saves with this type of data just isn't feasible on low-end systems.

Originally posted by Shifty: Get a program called EasUS Todo Backup. You can set it up to back up your save folder as often as you want and set it to only keep a set number of backups so it caps the amount of space the backups take.

This also works great if hosting a game server and restoring corrupt saves is as easy as a few clicks of your mouse and it's free.

Just don't trust any saves made while the client was running. Files being actively written to when it backs up will be corrupted. It's possible that it will corrupt the live files as well.

Have tested that software before.

Originally posted by 【イサク】:

Originally posted by SylenThunder: Just don't trust any saves made while the client was running. Files being actively written to when it backs up will be corrupted. It's possible that it will corrupt the live files as well.

Have tested that software before.

is the steam backup options in properties a viable way of backing up files?

No. The backups for 7 Days are considerably larger than what Steam Cloud allows.