I put 48 hours into Mafia 3 and my save corrupted.

I accidentally uninstalled Steam months ago and a few of my games lost their saves.

I once tried to use a third party device to back up my PlayStation 2 memory card, instead of backing up the data it erased the card 😲
I was partway through multiple games so to put it mildly I was pretty upset... 😢

First time I got FF 7 on my PS1. Used a MAdCatz memory card. On disk 3. Go to load and the saves are gone.

That learned ME to NEVER use third party items other than Logitech.

Thats why I create every game two or more savefiles. (if its possible)

My worst save game loss was from a Hearts of Iron 2 campaign with Canada. I only had some few troops, even fewer airplanes and besides transport ships no navy, yet my frequent raids on the coasts from the Bretagne up to Denmark kept the Nazis busy and enabled the Sowjets to stabilize their front. It really was pretty much a last minute rescue for the Eastern War.
Some years later I conquered Italy, freed France and finally conquered Berlin. Just after Japan was defeated too and I considered to attack the USA, my game came to an unwanted end. :(

I once played King's Quest VI for the whole night and it crashed near the end (or maybe the power went out). Only then I realised I haven't saved even once.

with skyrim, an heavily modded run with 200+ mods, when i was a pirate. dont remember the playtime but it was in the order of hundreds. i had the wonderful idea to uninstall chesko s frostfall. thats how i learned uninstalling mods in middle playthrough is bad.

Played Morrowind GOTY for over 300h and did all kinds of stuff in the main game and the Tribunal addon. Continued with the second addon Bloodmoon and could not load a single file right before fighting the endboss. Watched the last 3 minutes on youtube :D

I have lost saves in past and have learned to backup often.
I use Windows 10 file history to backup my saves every 10minutes. This way I should never lose significant amount of saves.

Fuck games that save to registry tho (Hexcells, I'm looking at you)

Played FF IV on the bus on my Android phone for years. I think I got to the second last boss before the final boss. Anyways, my phone died, and the data was unrecoverable. I had a backup save file, but it was all the way in the beginning of the game.

assassin's creed 1. lost my save with a broke hdd when i was in memory block 7.
first and last AC i played. 🤦‍♀️

today i had my pillars of the earth save corrupted in the last chapter of book 1.
the ***official fix*** was to download savegames from their site to continue. it tells a lot about daedalic... 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

also lost my witcher 3 saves (from skellige) and fallout 4 (100% without dlc, incompatible mods) but those were ok since i wantes to replay them from the beginning.

View attached image.

Loaded up phantasy star online on GameCube for nostalgia purposes. Grinded for a sealed J sword everyday after getting home from school... Finally got it after about 400 hours estimated... Years later I loaded the game back up. Data was corrupted... Feels like such a waste. Granted things like action replay exist. I refused to ever use it back then but if I reclaim what is rightfully mine then I don't see any issues with it since it's offline data for my personal usage so I plan to do that someday. Second worst was Digimon world 3. Friend came over and wanted to show me his progress. He put his memory card in the 2 slot. Then made slight changes to his file and saved... Over mine on memory card 1. I had been playing it for weeks... Lol. Worse part is I was going to remove my card and put his in 2nd but I figured he'd remember his card was in the 2nd slot...

You know what the worst part is? It's a bug that's been known since launch, and which affects all the systems it was released on yet they've not fixed it :( My Mafia 3 save also got corrupted quite far in.

I would suggest manually backing up your saves outside of the game so you don't have to worry about this happening, especially with a game you put so much time into. I never trust the game and always create manual saves just incase something like this happens or if I really screw something up and want to revert back to a previous save. There's a few different places where a game might store it's save, so you have to do a bit of research for each game, but it is worth it. I even backup saves that save in the registry.

Darksiders 2.
I changed PC, and the save game didnt work. Apparently it was a known issue with the game.
Loved the same so I started again and in the end I just got bored of repeating everything and gave up.
Ended up watching the cutscenes on youtube to get closure.

Was halfway through the Bioshock remaster and my game crashed. Relaunched the game and all of my saves were gone x) After that I started manually backing them up just in case

I lost my NG+ save in Dark Souls 3. Who the fuck doesn't use cloud saving in this era ?

Technically not a corrupted save file, but I 'created' one with X Beyond the Frontier. Don't know how much I did from the story line, but I built a small empire with many little factories etc. in Teladi sectors and as I finalized the 1 MW shield factory, I was so hasty that I had to much speed to dock normally in a space station, that I bumped in and due the crash my docking speed was achieved. Okay fine, just my shield down doesn't matter. I saved and the next day I loaded and undocked. And now the problem become obvious: I crash docked so shitty, that I automatically crash into the station again and died due this. No problem? Just load another save? Yeah... no. I didn't saved on any other slot, so several hundreds(yeah I enjoyed the building part of X-Series) hours gone waste.... from that point onwards I save now everytime on multiple slots for the same save game(at different times of course) and value anything someone put many time into a project way higher.