Horror stories of lost saves

So I just booted up my PS3 to get back to my new favorite pastime, Persona 4. I watch the intro, click 'Load Game' and see:

NO DATA

Huh? That's odd. Checked the PS2 memory card and Persona 4 is there. Let me check again.

NO DATA

Turn the console on and off?

NO DATA

Looked it up online and apparently this is a common problem with no fix. Hours of gameplay, gone in the blink of an eye.

Anyone who's been playing games for a long time knows game saves can be fickle mistresses. So if you don't mind, could you share your own personal stories to help ease my weary soul? Misery loves company.

Funny you mention that, I actually had a similar issue during my first actual playthrough of Persona 4 years and years ago. I had watched the ER and decided to play it for myself, so I bought a PS2 copy off of Amazon and was playing it on my PS3. One day, I went to load up my save game which was just outside Kanji's boss door and got a fat "Game data has been corrupted" message. And that's pretty much where my Persona 4 playthrough stopped.

That is, until P4G came out on Vita and I dumped over 200 hours in it and expect to eventually drop another 50 or so into it to get the two or three trophies I have yet to get.

When I was a kid, my mom let my 3 or 4 year old brother, who obviously couldn't read at the time, play my GameBoy (I guess as a way to distract him/because he was complaining/whatever).

He managed to save over my Pokemon Red save file that had all 151 Pokemon in the Pokedex.

I didn't start letting him play my games again until he was in middle/high school.

I had corrupted memory on my PS2 memory card and lost my Dragon Quest 8 save because of it. I was 83 hours in and had all the best weapons and armor and I was just about to take on Rapthorn...then it was all gone.

Recently, after one and a half hours with Yooka-Laylee, the power went out in my neighborhood. I was teleporting into a world when it happened. When the power was finally back, the save was completely gone. I've no desire to rewatch all those unskippable cutscenes yet. I like the idea of auto-saves, but I think they're garbage without a backup system, like two alternating auto-save files.

I'm also disappointed at how difficult it is to transfer my PS2 save files from the virtual PS3 memory cards to PCSX2. They're just sitting on my computer hard drive, unusable.

I have had to start over every Bethesda game (Elder scrolls & Fallout) since Morrowind due to to either a corrupted save or an accidental overwrite. I believe I ended up starting Oblivion over at least 3 times. On the bright side, it gave me chance to try out different classes/quest lines.

Persona 4 Golden: My save was lost in an account transfer or something. That was about 20 hours into the game. I really do need to go back and clear that game off the backlog

LittleBigPlanet: My save either corrupt or was overwritten or something as I discovered one day upon loading it up to discover my 80% progress (approximately) of unlocked items was just gone.

The Sims 2: A bit of a strange one but for whatever reason I seemed to enjoy The Sims 2 on the original Xbox more so than I should have. So much so that I was essentially at the closing moments of the game only to have my save overwritten by someone playing on my console. I stopped playing shortly after that incident occurred.

Someone lost my memory card that had my FF9 save near the very end. Never beat the game :/

My brother used to yell at me for putting my save files on his N64 memory packs. At some point, I put my Rayman 2: The Great Escape file on there. One day I went to play and it was gone -- brother had taught me a lesson. I really liked that game. I still give him crap about it.

The one that comes to mind was my PS3 blowing up and losing my progress towards the Uncharted 2 platinum. I have all the trophies except for finishing it on the hardest difficulty and to get to that point, I'd have to play it again to even unlock the hardest difficulty.

The same incident also ate my Final Fantasy VII save that had every character at max level and I was grinding to max out all the stats.

Last time I played Last Remnant. I had the best gear I could get, optimized parties across the board, right at the end boss ready to go in and finally finish the game after over 90 hours of playing. This was back before steamworks and me backing up saves. You probably know where this is going. I saved my game, quit gaming for the night and the next day I booted up the game... save file not found. The save file got corrupted and I still have no idea how.

I still haven't gotten the energy to pick this game up again after that.

Lost my Spore saves, hundreds of hours of my sister and I's creations gone and my save where I was neutral with the Grox down the drain...

Holy fuck. That hurt to read. I'm so sorry.

The worst for me was my Gamecube memory card died and I lost my 100% save file of Smash Bros. Melee (all characters, stages, and trophies), and my save file for Metroid Prime AND The Wind Waker when I was on the final bosses/areas for BOTH games.

This happened to me too! I still haven't found the motivation to earn everything back...

Not an important game and was a long time ago, but one of the few Xbox launch titles we had was a Shrek game and we had a file at like 98% complete and my cousin came over for about 20 minutes and made a new profile, of course there were multiple slots but he chose to erase the only one that was active.

Had to send in my Switch and lost my first 30-40 hours of Zelda that sucked pretty hard.

I accidentally erased my cousins Final Fantasy save for the NES. It was pretty bad. Some say he never recovered.

I was right near the end of Far Cry 2 and my save got corrupted, I put a lot of time into it and couldn't find the motivation to do it all again so I ended up selling the game.

I just sent my Switch in for repair and Nintendo said they do aim to restore saves but I'm very scared that I'll lose my 120 hours in Zelda. I have beaten the game so it wouldn't be the end of the world but I really hope it's still there when I get it back.

@pompouspizza: @evilsbane: A little off-topic but may I ask what the problem was? I'm planning on getting a Switch myself, but I'll probably hold off if there's some widespread problem with the hardware.

I see Pokemon mentioned here before -- I once lost a lot of (around 20 hrs) progress in Pokemon X, but couldn't give a rats ass about it. The worst case I could think of is one with GTA V in fact... I had played to about 80-something per cent on PS3, then the PS4 version came out and I mother effin' 100%-d that game; then, somehow, I managed to choose "Saved data on USB Storage - Copy to System Storage" on an older backed up save instead of "Save data in System Storage - Copy to USB Storage" -- I mean, who the frick came up with these naming conventions anyway? Especially if you've had a couple drinks or 10, really easy to choose the wrong one. I guess it's my own fault, but long-story-short, I ended up overwriting my 100% save with a 30-something % save. Fml. Blah.

I can remember losing weeks worth of progress in a couple of old PS2 games. My previously used memory card erased everything in an instant. Resident Evil 4 saves (including my 3/4 done professional play-through so I never got to use that damn plasma gun), complete games of God of War 1 and 2, all my MGS3 Subsistence data, a game save about halfway through Okami (which was a lot of playtime), all 3 Ratchet and Clank games, and my complete Bully save. I was around 13-14 at the time so it wasn't too soul crushing considering I was about to get a 360 anyway, but it still hurt.

I also had a hell of time finding a VMU around town when I got my Dreamcast in the winter of 2001 and Sega had started to pack it in. So I would play Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for hours and know that I'd have to unlock certain characters all over again. Not really lost saves, but I remember there be an element of randomness to how new characters were unlocked and it took me a while to get them all.

I got to the last dungeon in Majora's Mask. My mom called me to come eat lunch so I saved and turned it off. Came back, full and ready to go only to turn the game back on and see that there was no longer any save data on the game. Have hated MM ever since.

I lost a mid-game save of Final Fantasy 6 (20 hours?) during my very first playthrough due to a freak occurrence that wiped all of my saves from the cartridge for some reason. Never happened again after that.

I also lost an endgame (disc 4) save of Final Fantasy 8 because I was dumb and saved over it accidentally.

Last bad one I remember was Machinarium on pc. The game's flash-based, so that somehow connects it to the browser and if you just happened to delete your browser history effectively, it also deleted your save games for it. Luckily I wasn't that far into it, but it was still really annyoing. Another one was with Diablo 3 on PS4, when I forgot to copy all the saved data from each user before changing the hdd. My main was fortunately still intact, but lost a bunch of other characters.

I lost quite a number of save files from using Uplay. AC4, AC3 and a watch dog save files, I think.

I've had several corrupted save files on PS1/2 games due to shitty third party memory cards.

I remember starting Grand Theft Auto 3 three or four times due to corrupted saves and my Final Fantasy VII save disappeared on disc 3 somewhere. I never went back to it.

I bought a used four-port PS3 back in 2012 or so, so you know Sony uses Magicgate encryption on all their storage media? You can backup the key so you can migrate a hard drive to a new PS3, but only if the old PS3 is working... anyway, long story short the damn thing yellow-lighted out of the blue after about six months, taking my hdd and all my saves with it. Had to reformat when I bought a new super-slim.

First one to really piss me off was my max level Phantasy Star Online character I had put so many hours in to him, damn that VMU! I also lost all my saves for inFamous 1 & 2 when my PS3 died, as well as losing some new saves for a few PS4 games when I upgraded my HDD for some reason the online saves wouldn’t download!

I now always make sure all my save are backed up.

I had a weird one early on with the PSX in 1995. I had an early game and didn't have my mem-card installed. I figured I was okay because they gave me a string of Circle, Square, Triangle and Cross symbols to write down. But I wrote it down wrong, so I could never get that save back. While early memory cards and games were faulty, they were better than they system of writing symbols down.

That was my only big one. I was very afraid of my garaged in Gran Turismo 2 getting wiped, but it never happend to me. Mostly my issues was saving over teh top of saves I meant to keep, I did that in Civilization 1 & 2 many times. I would want to keep a particularly ambitious start, but would accidentally write over it.

I lost my completed Castlvania: Symphony of the Night save and my 60+ hour save in Final Fantasy VII on PS1 all at once. Why?

Well, my brother was playing a game called Deathtrap Dungeon. He'd been stuck on some part for a while, and his latest attempt had almost gotten him past it...and then he slipped up and fell down a pit. He got up and kicked the PS1 right in the front. Right where the memory card ports are.

The memory card split in two.

Way back in the day I played Legend of Zelda 2. Got up to the last palace and my save got corrupted. Never touched the game again.

Not technically a lost save but back in the day I played Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando i'd say about 3/4ths of the way through. Got to a bug where my ship wouldn't stop looping. Started over got to that point again and the bug happened again. Never finished that game it was a huge bummer.

@ajamafalous: same thing happened to me but instead of a younger brother it was my Dad.....MY DAD.

UGH

Infamous 2 was my big one. Somehow all my saves from the middle of game on disappeared.

Could not believe it, and I never understood why.

Something like that happened to me. When I was younger I didn't really understand how saving in MM worked so after playing it for 3 hours one day and saving at the owl statue I turned the game off. I went back the next day and all my progress was gone. I haven't played it since.

These all sound awful. Really the only ones I can speak of are from transferring PCs and losing non-cloud-saved game saves. Nothing major really. I was at my parents and I booted up my ps2 and played some of my original Valkyrie Profile save.

I believe we've had this thread relatively recently, but whatever. I remember saying then and will say now that the only time that happened was when I was playing Super Metroid, I was nearing the end of the game and someone (I don't remember who; may have been me or my brother) tapped the SNES system, and the game froze. I took the cartridge out and put it back in to resume playing from the last save, but all the saves were gone. I was done playing.

I once pulled out a memory card while it was saving on my PS2 and corrupted/killed my FFX save.

... I was a lot of hours into it.

I love Hitman: Blood Money, but my save on my original Xbox corrupted 3/4 of the way through. I started it again a year later, and it happened again, at the same point. Several years later, I bought the game on PC and tried again. Happened a-fuckin-gain.

Most recently happened with my 3DS. I have done two system transfers, one from the original model to the XL, then from the XL to the New 3DS XL.

First transfer went fine. Not sure what went wrong on the second one but I lost all save data for Steamworld Dig, A Link Between Worlds, and Majora's Mask 3D. Wouldn't have minded really but all three were games I had not completed. Still haven't to this day in fact.

As a slightly adjacent story to this topic, I have had a few bad experiences with games that do not auto-save. Way way back, with Pokémon Emerald on GBA, I played for about 2-3 hours at one point only to turn the game off without saving. I realized what I had done moments after shutting it off. More recently, when playing Majora's Mask 3D (this is after the debacle above) I completed the entire second when suddenly the screen went black and gave me the power down/sleep mode option. I think I must have accidentally rested my hand on the power button.

Had 2 PS3's die on me. The first time, I was about 50 hours into Borderlands, it died so I sent it in. Not only did I lose all my save data because they just sent a refurb back, I also lost the Borderlands disc itself. The second time it happened, I was about 3/4ths through Yakuza 3. That time I just pulled the damn thing open, got the game disc and harddrive out of the system, and sent it in. Turns out you can't put another PS3's drive into a new PS3 without formatting the thing.

Stupidest thing I've ever done though, Kingdom Hearts was the first RPG-ish game I ever played. Made it to the final boss, died a bunch, and decided to grind later. I started a new game for some reason, and saved over my endgame save. Pretty sure I just watched the ending on youtube after that.

I've mentioned this here before, but it still kills me years later.

I had a save at the final boss of Ninja Gaiden Black (the 360 downloadable version). I'm terrible at that game, so this was a big deal for me. While playing Soul Calibur, my 360 ate it with an E74 crash. Sucked, but no biggie, as Microsoft repaired it for free. Rather, they charged $100 and then refunded it, but yeah. Anyway, I received my replacement, and when I put my HDD in and loaded up Ninja Gaiden... a whole list of corrupted saves greeted me. Turns out that removing the 360 hard drive for any reason will break all of the saves in that game, because emulation weirdness I guess.

Needless to say, I never touched that game again. Of all the damn games for that to be a thing with...

The one and only time my wife sat down to play a console game by herself, it was Dragon Quest VIII. She was playing it on our backward-compatible PS3. She was dozens of hours in when the console went YLOD. She didn't have the heart to start over.

@nicksmi56: I had a corruption of about a 20 hours save on Far Cry 2 on the Xbox 360. There was a period of time just after release that it had a bug that would corrupt your save and you were lost.

I never finished that game and never went back to it. I loved it, up until that point. But I didn't want to re-do it. I always said I would go back, never have.

Just wanted to chime in and say that thanks to the power of multiple save files, I am slowly making my way up to where I was in Persona 4. Luckily I wasn't TOO far in and I've found myself with a lot more free time recently than I usually have. The game did try to wipe my save two more times: once when Slot 1 displayed that classic NO DATA message, and another time when Slot 3's save completely wiped my hours and bumped my difficulty down to Beginner. Saving in 4 slots at once seems to ensure that I always have at least one slot that's up to date at all times though.

All's well that ends well!

@nicksmi56: I had a problem where the battery appeared to be draining significantly when I turned it off and back on. For example, if I charged it to 100% and turned it off overnight, it could be as low as 60% when I turned it back on.

I'm pretty sure it was just an issue with the battery read out because whenever the battery would appear to drain, if I let it get to 1% I could keep playing for about an hour and a half before it turned off.

Regardless it drove me crazy so I ended up sending it in, it had been happening since launch but I didn't want to do anything about it until I finished Zelda.

Nintendo have been great about it though, I'm getting it back tomorrow after just over a week and they have extended my warranty by a month.

Lost my GTA Vice City 100% complete save with all the secret cars and stuff when my memory card erased the save when the power went out.

When my first PS3's hard drive failed (Launch console) I lost my GTA4, MGS4, Disgaea 3, Bayonetta and a dozen other 100% complete save files. I managed to recreate most of them over the course of a year or two but lost them again when my ps3 died and knocked my second hard drive out. I backed some of them up, but the new ps3 would not accept some of the backups.

When I was little my older (much much older) brother went away for a few days. He had been playing Secret of Mana, and my younger brother and I would play it with him from time to time. I liked the game enough that I wanted to play it myself while he was gone. He said something to the effect of "you can play it as long as you don't save over my furthest save."

I forgot which save slot he said not to save over.

I am the monster of this lost save horror story.

He actually hasn't touched a video game since this time.

My save for The Witcher got corrupted about 50-60 hours in. I was only keeping a single file and the game crashed while I was saving.

Learned my lesson there. Now I obsessively make multiple save files in any game that'll let me.

Dragon warrior ... last boss.... power surge....clean wipe of saves on cartridge.....hulk rage.