HDD crash and loss of save files; a warning

[chaughton22]

My laptop died about 2 months ago, hard drive contents were not easily recoverable, and was able to buy a new one 2 weeks ago. When I did so I discovered that while I keep my porn game stash on an external drive (makes it a lot easier to shield from prying eyes), all my saves disappeared. So I still have 200+ GB of games on my external drive, probable total played time 100+ hours, and now I have to start over, which is rather frustrating when you've already played a game start to finish.

Just wanted to do a public service announcement to make sure folks are aware that save data is not necessarily stored in the same folder you install the game to, and in fact can end up defaulting to a totally separate hard drive.

So now I'm giving even MORE preference than before to games that have galleries; it's just hard to justify holding ctrl to skip hours of dialogue to go through and create ghetto gallery by saving at the start of every H scene for a quick fap.... I will make a shoutout and say that Harem Hotel and Sisterly Lust are two games that I had no hesitation replaying, both are truly excellent.

Anyone else encounter this scenario the hard way and able to commiserate?

 

[kytee]

For your specific case, if you only ever install your porn games on an external hard drive, you can create a symbolic link from the folder where your games are saved to a folder on your EHD. This creates a 'fake' folder that when accessed, takes the user or the program to the location you specify. This allows you to save and load games directly from your EHD, though I think it might break if you try to save or load a game if you don't have the hard drive plugged in.

 

[Droid Productions]

In general, saving to the folder where your game is installed is considered bad manners. Both OSX and Windows provide user-storage locations where stuff like that is supposed to go, and depending on where a game is installed (for example to c:\Program Files\) you don't actually have write-access to the sub-folder without Admin access.

 

[fapperisu95]

I'd rather games always asking you to pick which location to save, before defaulting to user/documents or whatever random location they thought of.

 

[grave_merc]

Have you tried data recovery software? Ontrack saved my life more than once!

 

[gamersglory]

Ren'py based games save in the game folder and in your user folder in windows

 

[kyho]

Ren'py based games save in the game folder and in your user folder in windows

Not always. Sometimes it’s just "AppData\Roaming\RenPy".
I’m referring to save files only (the player’s game progress), not logs or other stuff.