Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - Bugs & Technical Problems broken save file

I also had save files which were regularly getting corrupted, but this did not help me. I did eventually find the root cause, and I never found it posted anywhere else, so I figured I'd make an account and post it here.

I play the Steam version of the game, and I was getting save files that were not listed as options on the load screen. I would play for a day, come back the next day, and find that I couldn't load any saves beyond an autosave several hours behind where I had ended the night before. I could see the save files in the LevelCache folder as described above, but they were not being loaded properly in the game, and renaming the files/folders didn't help. After it happened multiple times, I got frustrated, and resigned that I was probably just going to have to stop playing for good.

I did figure out the root cause eventually, though. My save files were getting corrupted because Steam was saving my files to the Cloud by default, and when I was done playing for the day, I would save, close the game, and turn off my computer relatively quickly. Closing the game would trigger Steam to start uploading the saves to the cloud. The next day, it would download the saves again. If the upload was interrupted, such as by turning my computer off, some saves would only be partially uploaded, and the corrupted cloud version of the file would override the healthy local version of the save file the next time I logged into Steam.

With this root cause in mind, there were two easy solutions to prevent future saves from being corrupted.
1. Wait until Steam finishes uploading save files before turning off the computer when done playing
2. Go to Steam > Divinity Original Sin 2 > Properties > General and uncheck the Keep games saves in the Steam Cloud box

I went with option 2.

I never found a way to restore the original save, I think the corrupted version overwrote the healthy version in a way that is not recoverable for me. This was easier to tolerate after feeling assurance that it was not going to happen again.

Larian, I don't know all that much about how Steam's cloud saves work, or if you determine how they get pulled or what. I presume you have some ability to set the terms of the upload/download, since your save file system seems unique among my Steam games. If you do have the ability to control the upload/download process, I suggest you perform a corruption check on the downloaded save files prior to overriding local files of the same name, and test it out by turning off a computer in the middle of uploading saves to the cloud, and seeing if those saves are still usable when you boot the computer back up. If this is the same cloud save system you use for other games, I'd apply whatever change you make to those too. You'll probably save some fans from a few pretty crappy moments if you do.