Losing a save game file is like losing someone you love

It’s been awhile since my last entry and the reason is because I’ve been doing practically nothing but playing Borderlands every single day…

It’s not something you really think about because you’re too busy enjoying your video games to even consider it. Of course, you’re given plenty of warnings to never turn off the power to your console or PC to prevent such a thing from happening in the first place… but at some point, it probably will catch up to you and you are going to lose a save game file as I did about an hour ago…

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the PC version of Borderlands recently… A LOT of time. According to Steam, in less than 2 weeks, I have spent over 156 hours playing that game. Today I had just gotten my Lilith up to lv54 and had just found a newer, better Maliwan Combustion HellFire to burn everyone and everything with. It was another day of gaming for me and I was off to find more rare and awesome weapons for Lilith to use.

And then while I was at one of Scooter’s Catch-A-Ride stations, it happened. The fan turned off (it’s summer down here in Australia) and the lights went out. My HDTV remained turned on as well as my PC for a brief moment and I suddenly realised that the save game icon was flashing in the top corner of the screen. In that very instance I knew what was coming next… they had warned us about it time and time again, but I had no control over the situation and could do nothing about what was going to happen next!

As I braced myself for the worst, the TV and PC switched off and I was in complete darkness at 9:56pm… A second later the power turned back on, the fan, lights, TV and PC came back to life and I waited those few agonising seconds for my PC to reboot and to load up Borderlands to see with my own eyes if my worst fears became true.

!Corrupted

As soon as I saw that… I felt like I had just lost someone I cared about… their entire life extinguished in an instant. I felt light-headed and was in a daze… I didn’t know what to do! What could I do? The power outage killed my Lilith! BRING ME BACK MY LILITH!! I was so distraught that I had forgotten something very important… in modern medicine, a human life can still be saved, even after the person is declared dead. In modern computing (modern computing?) data is not always lost and can be recovered/restored.

In my moment of despair, I had forgotten this very important fact… until I went onto Skype to share my bad news and was reminded by a guardian angel of gaming XD …

[9:58:09 PM] Lynk: i’m going to cry
[9:58:16 PM] Lynk: i want to cry
[9:58:22 PM] Lynk: i’m fucking depressed now
[9:58:34 PM] Lynk: fuckit, i’m crying
[9:58:38 PM] Lynk: power outage
[9:58:43 PM] Lynk: borderlands was saving
[9:58:47 PM] Lynk: data corrupted
[9:58:53 PM] Lynk: lost save
[9:59:06 PM] Lynk: lv54 lilith gone
[10:01:51 PM] Lynk: i don’t know what to do now
[10:04:13 PM] leXX: ouch
[10:04:49 PM] leXX: try doing a restore on you pc, you never know it might work
[10:05:09 PM] Lynk: how do i do that? XD
[10:05:22 PM] leXX: what os are you using?
[10:05:27 PM] Lynk: win7
[10:05:59 PM] leXX: accessories, system tools, system restore
[10:06:08 PM] Lynk: ah here we go… previous versions
[10:07:08 PM] Lynk: okay restored to a version made 1pm today… 9 hours ago… hold onto your butts
[10:07:16 PM] leXX: good luck
[10:08:21 PM] Lynk: XD thanks leXX, i would’ve just given up and been all depressed
[10:08:30 PM] Lynk: i’m back to lv50, but i can live with that
[10:08:33 PM] leXX: you owe me ;)

Thanks to leXX for reminding me that you could do that with Windows 7. If it weren’t for her, I probably would’ve just been depressed for the next two weeks until Dead Space 2 came out and I focused my attention on that.

Lilith is safe now… the restore file was 9 hours old and she lost 4 levels and is back down to lv50… but I can live with that. With the save game restored, I’m reminded again why I love Windows 7 and realise that if this had happened on a different OS or on a console, I wouldn’t have been so lucky. I don’t actively backup save game files… but I think I’m going to start now.

So anyway, that’s my story… but the question is, have any of you had a similar experience? Were you able to restore your save or was it lost forever with all of your hard work? I honestly don’t know if I would’ve ever gone back and played Borderlands again if I had lost that save completely… it’s not something I want to go through ever again.