Hi guys…
A friend of mine played with TWP on my computer. She didn’t save manually her game.
I played a game, overwriting her auto-save. Is there a way to recover it, or is it lost forever?
Thank you.
I think it’s gone forever.
On Windows you can try Recuva to recover that file.
On Mac I don’t know.
That works only if the previous version of that file isn’t (partially) overwritten. For Linux there are similar tools, btw.
I have an idea.
I have three Stem clients:
One on my MacBook, one on my iMac, one on the Win Bootcamp of my mac.
Steam and TWP is installed on each. So probably one local copy of that file exists on one of the other two systems, right? I could disconnect the system from the net, open TWP and I’d find the savegame, right?
But then? How do I save it in another position? Will it synchronize with no problem when I connect again? Or maybe I’d be better to tweak it, finding the file without opening the game and retrieving it in some way?
Thanks again
Disclaimer: I don’t use Steam at the moment, but I maybe I can answer some of your questions:
Yes. If the systems were synced while/after your friend has played TWP and Steam saves a local copy of the save files. (If Steam uses cloud saves then you can’t recover old save files.)
Yes.
Just copy it to another location to make a backup and then overwrite with it the autosave file on the system your friend was playing on.
Depends on the sync algorithm. If Steam declares the file with the latest date as the “current” version, you have to make sure first that your old file is the newest one.
My suggestion: Disconnect all your systems. Find the TWP save files and make a backup of them at a save place. Do this on each system. Then try to copy the save file you need to the other systems and see what’s happening.
btw: Doesn’t the Steam client provide a version control or backup system? Can’t you just “roll back” the save files?
And wouldn’t it be easier to replay the game until the point where your friend stopped playing?
Yes, probably 
Thank you, anyway
You should be able to get a good save game from one of your systems as Someone described. Store it in a safe place.
To overwrite the existing one you may try to start the game, switch to your favourite file explorer and overwrite the save game(s).
If you then close the game Steam should sync the files. If this doesn’t work because the file’s timestamp is older you may have to set a more current timestamp on those files first.
I didn’t try this, but usually renaming an autosave.sav file to 1.sav would copy the autosave to the first game slot.
Look in the savegames folder for the proper naming conventions. And backup the whole directory in another place first before you start meddling.
Sometimes there is a text index of the used savegame slots that you might need to edit too. But knowing Ron being a decent programmer, that probably won’t be the case here.
I’ll try some things later and post back.
@ema it really is quite simple:
the autosave slot is called Savegame1, the others are named Savegame2,… up to Savegame9
the savegame consists of the .save file and a .png for the thumbnail
So copy/rename any manually saved game and its thumbnail to Savegame1 to put it back in the autosave slot
Or vice versa copy the Savegame1.* files to another one to make a manual save in another slot
Note that you can use the same technique to copy additional save-points in the game without being limited to 9 savegame slots.
No need to worry about the save.dat file (it is recreated on the fly)
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Hey, thanks. That’s what I needed to know.
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