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[TD1]

I suspect you can't, but I may as well ask. In my save folder, I have "Current" and "[InsertWorldNameHere]". I saved recently in what turned out to be a very bad place. Is there any way to access previous saves, even if they aren't in the save folder? I do believe it's impossible, but I'd not turn down a miracle

[Starver]

For future efforts, you may wish to enable Seasonal Saves.

Go into the d_init.txt within the data/init/ directory (or data\init\ folder, if you prefer) and change [AUTOSAVE:NONE] to [AUTOSAVE:SEASONAL] (or YEARLY, but you lose the finer-grained benefit and still get a quarter of the bother).

You might also want to make it [INITIAL_SAVE:YES] to get the benefit starting from the beginning of any game, but rarely is there such a catastrophe that needs you to start from the start again with the hope of doing better again before the first spring, that isn't down to the whole embark location. That's most useful for fake-embarking on a do-or-die prospect forlorn hope, the knowledge from which you take to 'guide' your embark-proper straight to goodies/avoiding dangers (which can probably be done better with the Reveal/Unreveal hacks, mostly) or semi-sandboxing something that you know you might want to do differently.

Other options around there are useful in this. But the first one, in whatever form, gives you RegionN-datestamp save-folders that can be reused later if you feel you want to.

Protip: Never load a Seasonal Savegame by its autoSSed-folder name, with the timestamp appended. Either delete/rename the default RegionN (or however you may have renamed it, e.g. "IceMegaproject", if you like that better than Region7 or equivalent) then copy the Seasonal folder and rename it as if the RegionN (delete the OS-version of "Copy of" prefix, however that works, and the post-name timestamp, and work from there), or just copy the Seasonal and make it RegionN(a, b, c, etc), so that its Seasonal Saves are Region2a-datestamp or IceMegaproject3c-datestamp.) If you only ever copy-and-rename the Seasonal file you don't get confusing new Seasonal Saves of a restarted Seasonal Save, nor do you lose the original save you just used in case you wish to do another do-over.


Or, manually, whenever you feel like this might be a useful savescum point, quit (and save, obviously) and take the RegionN folder in saves and make your own backup by copying it. To an alternate folder/drive of your choice. In fact, it's probably useful to do this with a pre-embark/adventure WorldGen save to get go-over possibilities with a different starting setup (site, perhaps shuffled a tile over, initial seven dwarf skills/equipment, or even Adventuring instead of Foetressing or vice-versa). And you can also do this with an Adventurer save, mid-adventuring, if you think you ought to...

You could also shuffle out ancient backup saves (say more than a year of game-time ago, or a half-dozen Adventurer cliff-hangers ago) to alternate Dirs, discs or even just delete them, to make your Load Game choices not quite so lengthy.


As to recovering a badly saved savegame's history, without any of the above being done, I really don't think there's much that can be done. Unless there's quite a sophisticated 'rewind' DFHack out there I don't know about. But hopefully I've helped you for next time, by filling in some useful info.


Edited to improve bad wording. More bad wording doubtless lurks within the spaghetti of description.

[Bumber]

Your computer might have a "previous versions" feature for files. I don't think it performs a backup very frequently, however, and there might be a limit on file size.