Is the Steam Cloud responsible for character save/world deletion or corruption?

[Own]

I've never had the Steam Cloud enabled and I've never lost a single character. But I see people saying that if they log onto someone else's Steam account on their computer their saves are overwritten forever. And if they crash, their saves vanish - though mine never has even though I've crashed plenty now and then.

I think it might be worth just disabling the Steam Cloud for a while and letting people back up their own saves, if it is responsible. Until it can be sorted out.

 

[KoBeWi]

I'm not using Steam Cloud and I lost my save two times. I remember Teddy saying something about save file table, which records what saves are on what position. But I thought it was removed, wasn't it? There was also an emergency save feature, that saved game upon crash. So many ways to destroy your save...

 

[Teddy]

The steam cloud is definitely at least a bit bugged. I don't think it's the cloud that deletes save files when it crashes, though. I actually suspect an emergency save routine that triggers during a crash. I've disabled that for now, and we'll see if the save file disappearances continue after that change! If they do, then it's almost certain that the Steam cloud is bugging out, and we'll have to disable it until we can find a better solution...

Steam Cloud is really nice, but it would honestly be much better if it was disabled by default and the people who have use for it could enable it instead.

Anyways, for the next frontline patch (which should hit this week if Valve isn't unusually slow in the approval process of the translation suite) there's a new save file backup system that should hopefully be super overkill. It will create a Backup folder, where every created character will get a unique folder, and will have two separate styles of backup. Firstly, there will be five backup files on rotation, so if the latest save file gets corrupted, hopefully one of the earlier ones work. Also, a permanent backup will be made once every hour.

The vision is of course to have zero save file loss, but until then, a more robust backup system would probably save some tears

 

[KoBeWi]

I once played a game that made new backup file each time you save. But someone forgot to limit number of backup files, and after few hours I had over 160 backup files which used like 50 MB of space. I hope such thing won't happen with that new system

 

[Teddy]

I once played a game that made new backup file each time you save. But someone forgot to limit number of backup files, and after few hours I had over 160 backup files which used like 50 MB of space. I hope such thing won't happen with that new system

Haha, awesome

I actually don't have an upper limit right now, but then again you'd need to play for ~10 000 hours before the backups hit 50MB!