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[Kyronea]

So, I spent some seven hours of work on my fortress yesterday, and I go back to load it back up, and the savegame isn't there at all. Prior to this I had had it do autosaves with autobackups, but I turned that off because I felt like it was cluttering up with too many folders.

Only now there's no savegame at all. It was an autosave that I quit after, so...I don't get it. What happened to it?

[Stargrasper]

Not sure I understand what happened.  Unless you go into the save folder and explicitly delete saves, they shouldn't go away.

If you load from an autosave, it doesn't save to the actual savefile, it saves to the autosave.  Keep that in mind if that's what you're trying to get at.

Even if you forcibly crash DF without the standard save/quit function, it shouldn't affect any existing saves.

[Kyronea]

That's how I quit, after the autosave, was by using the Task manager to close the game. (Since the last time I tried saving and quitting normally, it never actually saved.)

So, what is the autosave then? Is it not a save file I can access after the game is shut down? Because if that's the case, I'm really annoyed, because that's how autosaves function on every other game I've ever played, and it wouldn't make much sense for it to not function that way here too.

[The Architect]

You forcibly terminated the program. It would be highly unreasonable for you to be upset if it isn't saved. Save it normally if you want it to be saved! Auto-saves are a backup feature so that if you play for several hours and your game is somehow terminated (computer shutdown on old models, etc), you won't have to backtrack so far. They aren't some magical code that prevents your computer from shutting down the executable program before it can save itself.

This is not Microsoft Word. It's a plain old executive program.

[Kyronea]

You forcibly terminated the program. It would be highly unreasonable for you to be upset if it isn't saved. Save it normally if you want it to be saved! Auto-saves are a backup feature so that if you play for several hours and your game is somehow terminated (computer shutdown on old models, etc), you won't have to backtrack so far. They aren't some magical code that prevents your computer from shutting down the executable program before it can save itself.

This is not Microsoft Word. It's a plain old executive program.

I'm well aware of what an auto-save is supposed to be.

But the thing is, I quit the program right after the auto-save. Now, does that delete the auto-save? Or what? By what you say, it sounds as if I should be able to load via the autosave, but I don't see it anywhere.

[Kanddak]

Wait, what do you mean the save isn't there at all?
At some point there was a region folder in data/save that got created when you generated your world.
Is that gone completely? If you go to start a new fort, does that world show up in the list?
Because if the whole world just vanished, something is going on that's way weirder than just "oh you forcibly quit the game and it didn't save"; that shouldn't be haphazardly deleting entire directories.

[Stargrasper]

You forcibly terminated the program. It would be highly unreasonable for you to be upset if it isn't saved. Save it normally if you want it to be saved! Auto-saves are a backup feature so that if you play for several hours and your game is somehow terminated (computer shutdown on old models, etc), you won't have to backtrack so far. They aren't some magical code that prevents your computer from shutting down the executable program before it can save itself.

This is not Microsoft Word. It's a plain old executive program.

I'm well aware of what an auto-save is supposed to be.

But the thing is, I quit the program right after the auto-save. Now, does that delete the auto-save? Or what? By what you say, it sounds as if I should be able to load via the autosave, but I don't see it anywhere.

As stated, it's a generally bad idea under any circumstance to forcibly shut down DF...or ANY program for that matter...but it shouldn't delete any existing saves.

You should be able to load any and all auto-saves from the 'Continue' main menu option.  The main save is the one that doesn't have a date appended to it.  The ones with a date appended are auto-saves such that the date displayed is the date the auto-save was created.

As I asked in the first post, did you delete the world save?

[Kyronea]

No, the region folder itself isn't missing. But when I loaded it, it was waaay back in the first year of the Fortress. (I'm on year seven or something, and the last folder that has an actual appended date to it is in the third year.)

I don't know why the most recent auto-save vanished. Maybe it somehow got deleted by forcibly shutting down the program. All I know is, it's not there anymore, if it ever was.

Looks like I basically messed myself up on it, then. Ah well. Not too big a deal. It was just my first fortress anyway.

Thanks for the assistance.

[Kanddak]

Ok, that's not the same as your save not being there at all.

If I were you I'd look carefully at the continue screen to see if all of your dated saves have years (on the right column) matching their folder timestamps. Is it possible that after you shut off the backups, you loaded your most recent backup instead of the main region file, and it was that copy of your fort that was being autosaved but NOT copied to new folders?

[Kyronea]

Ok, that's not the same as your save not being there at all.

If I were you I'd look carefully at the continue screen to see if all of your dated saves have years (on the right column) matching their folder timestamps. Is it possible that after you shut off the backups, you loaded your most recent backup instead of the main region file, and it was that copy of your fort that was being autosaved but NOT copied to new folders?

That...is probably exactly what I did. I'll go try loading that backup folder now.

[The Architect]

Wait, what do you mean the save isn't there at all?
At some point there was a region folder in data/save that got created when you generated your world.
Is that gone completely? If you go to start a new fort, does that world show up in the list?
Because if the whole world just vanished, something is going on that's way weirder than just "oh you forcibly quit the game and it didn't save"; that shouldn't be haphazardly deleting entire directories.

Agreed. The problem as described makes no sense! Although re-reading the comment on autosaves, I may have misunderstood the post. In fact, I only commented on the part that seemed intelligible and somewhat less self-contradictory. To explain, these statements confuse me even now:

"Prior to this I had had it do autosaves with autobackups, but I turned that off because I felt like it was cluttering up with too many folders."
"Only now there's no savegame at all. It was an autosave that I quit after, so...I don't get it. What happened to it?"

I have never heard of this happening. And the syntax makes it very unclear to me exactly what is meant, especially when considering this statement:
"But the thing is, I quit the program right after the auto-save. Now, does that delete the auto-save? Or what? By what you say, it sounds as if I should be able to load via the autosave, but I don't see it anywhere."

So... what? And then this...
"That's how I quit, after the autosave, was by using the Task manager to close the game. (Since the last time I tried saving and quitting normally, it never actually saved.)"

I have never even heard of that problem. So, you turned off autosaves, loaded an autosave, then it somehow autosaved while the autosave function was off, then you terminated it with Task Manager? And now you want to know where the save is, although according to you no main save file existed in the first place (if you are referring to the same game in the last statement)?

Until you can state what actually happened in a coherent way and without directly contradicting yourself, it will be impossible for anyone to really help you. My post was a little abrasive, but I was only trying to answer the only statement which seemed to make sense: you closed the program forcefully and wanted to know why Autosave didn't have your back. However since you say you have it off and say you have it on, it's impossible to know what on earth you really mean.

[Kyronea]

[AUTOSAVE:SEASONAL]
[AUTOBACKUP:NO]
[AUTOSAVE_PAUSE:YES]

Set this to YES if you want it to save the game when you start a new fortress.  If AUTOBACKUP above is set to YES, it will also create a copy of this new save.

That's from the init file. When I said auto-backup, I meant the autobackup listed there. By autosave, I meant the autosave feature. So when I said it didn't exist, that means that I thought that all autosaves copied to a new folder on their own, when apparently they only do that when auto-backup is enabled.

Sorry for the confusion. In any case, as it turns out, it did save to the folder that Kanddak suggested it might have saved to, so my game actually does exist after all. Thank you for the assistance, and I apologize again.

[The Architect]

It looks like Kanddak has you covered. Good luck getting your fort back; I would hate to see you go through the frustration of losing years of progress to an out-of-game error.

Note: If you do have autosave turned off, and you forcefully terminate the program, only your last saved material will be available. And if your autosave deletes itself after being loaded, you need to perform a proper save when you load an autosave so that your progress will be saved.

Edit: typo

[Kanddak]

You're entirely welcome.
Is it possible that your earlier normal-save worked just fine, and the only reason you thought it didn't was because you opened the wrong save afterward?

[Stargrasper]

You're entirely welcome.
Is it possible that your earlier normal-save worked just fine, and the only reason you thought it didn't was because you opened the wrong save afterward?

His behavior implies he's probably relied on auto-saves before.  Remember that when you load an auto-save, the next time you save, it saves over the auto-save, not the main save.  He probably hasn't normal saved the main save since the first year and has operated off of auto-saves since then.  Best guess I can come up with, anyway.