Losing those saves...

Had corrupted saves screwing me since Fallou 1 and 2(also happened with 3 +mods), as well as oblivion for sure.

But the worst case was in GTA Vice City, i really took my time with that game doing all side stuff and screwing around a lot; I was almost finishing the game that uses saveslots when a cousin saved a starting game on top of it. I don't know how he still lives.

Lost my progress in Split Second when I was close to finishing this game... The reason for it was unknown. As far as I remember the game just claimed the save was corrupted.

Borderlands 1, save didn't sync well. Got pop up with would you like to use your local saves or the ones in the cloud. Picked local obviously. They were mysteriously corrupt. After closing down borderlands steam uploaded that save to the cloud. I had nothing that day.

Lost a high 90s % save from GTA Vice City as my game copy was stolen, and my replacement platinum version of the game used a different save format. That's when I started saving 100% saves for all the GTA games I played :p

corrupted save right at the end of Condemned 1 or 2 (can't remember which) & I really couldn't be arsed to start again from the beginning & this one was my own stupid fault but got to the disc change without saving it for ages in Resi evil: Code Veronica on the gamecube & instead of opening it I decided to hit the power switch which still makes me cry to this day :(

What's the worst experience you've had as far as losing progress due to corrupt/deleted saves?
I was scavenging a town in Morrowind, saved the game, and gone to bed. (I had 5 different saves, as I progressed.) The next day, I continued the scavenging, and when entered a house, I fell out of the world, and the PC froze. I rebooted the Windows 98 SE, which found something corrupted data on the FAT32 file system. The size was familiar... I launched Morrowind, and my 3 last saves were gone! Even though I opened only the last save file, and did not saved the game...
Nowadays, these foolish operating system and file system related problems are fixed by using Linux and EXT4...

I'm expecting a lot of Fallout/Oblivion/Dark Souls players...
What the... Are you a mind reader? (o_O)

Actually never had much of a problem with losing save files. The only one I can remember is Dead Space 3 which I was making vids for so I abandoned that series thanks to losing the save file. The game just told me the file was corrupted once I tried to load it.

Also lost my save file for Wooden Sen'Sey but that was because something weird happened where the game started but the screen stayed black for a while. I could hear sounds though. I kinda mashed the controller in a typical dumb, impatient behaviour. Once the screen finally displayed the game I realized that I had ended up mashing the exact buttons needed to navigate to deleting my save. Doesn't really count as losing a save file though since I manually did it... albeit unknowingly.

With Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, I had played twenty hours up to that point, unlocked multiple endings and pretty close to finishing the last paths to take only to get a corrupt save file after saving in some apparently buggy place. Still haven't completed it up till now, it's a shame because I really liked it a lot but I would have to manually click all that text away again since there's also no option to skip it during your "first" time through and I'm not going to go through all of those hours again.

I had quite a few games saved and played through on Steam and my entire computer crashed making me lose all the saves to all those games... Skyrim, Bioshock, Borderlands, Dark Souls, ect. I lost everything and was so mad I couldn't even stand to replay anything for a good week.

Aquaria, due to a hard drive dying and taking my 13 hours of progress with it. I never touched the game afterwards, and it's a shame because I love it.

Actually, there are also a few "cursed" games I have in my backlog, some of them go back even a decade. No matter what I do with them, I lose my savefiles for them, usually after 4-5 hours of progress.

• Deus Ex - started 5(!) times in my lifetime, never made it past Hell's Kitchen area because I always lost my saves with faulty windows installations. First try: 2004.
• Thief 1 - started 3 times, twice lost my saves in the catacombs level, third time the game crashed randomly on loot pickups so I shunned it angrily. Fifth time overcame the issues and completed the game, it was a year ago. First try: 2009.
• Final Fantasy VII: 3 tries, once I lost the saves right at the beginning of the game. Serves me right for pirating the shitty PC version, I hope this Steam one has cloud support... First try: 2008
• Final Fantasy VIII: 4 tries. Usually my saves got lost on disc fucking 3. That is freaking painful. Overcame this obstacle 3 years ago though. First try: 2010.
• Black & White: 3 tries, usually lose interest for a long time on island #3 or #4, and right on that time when I feel like continuing, I realize that I lost my savefiles in a Windows reinstall or they got inexplicably corrupted. The damn thing mocked me with the fact that all of my save files were corrupted, except for one that was at the beginning of island #1. Motherfucker. First try: 2008.
• Chrono Trigger: 5 tries, always make my way up to the first Lavos fight and around it, then bye bye save files. I should probably get a SNES just for this game at this point. First try: 2002. Yeah, fuck this game in particular, I'll never know how it ends.
• Prince of Persa 1 and 2: usually make some huge progress into it, I remember fighting the shadow Prince in the first game's SNES version, and having the environment change fuck all hours into the second one on DOS. Honestly can't even tell how many tries these took, first try for both was... well... in 1998.

I don't know what the fuck is up with these, and these are only a few off the top of my head, but there are just some games that seem to avoid me with their endings. I guess if they had personalities, they would hate me to death.

I think we all had that little cousin that started a new game on our Pokémon Blue/Red and saved before talking with Oak.

I had 200+ hours in FFX, all the ultimate weapons, etc., I was just trying to fill in those completely empty nodes (like the black ones with nothing at all) with the fillers you got from beating the tougher enemies in the monster arena when I accidentally saved over my file with my sisters 2 hour save. Sad thing is I was waiting to 100% the rest of the game before going to the point of no return, so I never did beat FFX, no clue what happens at the end. :D

Had many many hours in both Dirt 2 and FUEL. Had Dirt 2 finished and had FUEL about 70% complete when GFWL messed up and I lost my save games for both.

Really ticked me off.

Overwritten a save for Final Fantasy X, it wasn't as much time as Monukai though.
Also, I've done 100% in Ratchet & Clank, Up Your Arsenal, Deadlocked and Size Matters multiple times. I'm sure you will get back there with a bit of work.

The only time I lost a big save was on pokemon yellow where I could only have 1 save. Then someone decided they wanted to start a new game.

When I rather rashly formatted my HDD recently, I did not back anything up as I did not think there was anything of worth on there. I discovered pretty soon after that I had lost a Fifa 14 career save of a couple of years and My beautiful floating ship in Terraria. I got over these rather small loses and moved on from the terror of that day.
Flash forward a couple of weeks later and I realise that my only copy of my Titan Quest: Immortal Throne saves used to live on that HDD. Thousands of hours of loot are now gone. It still stings a little today.

The only saves I have lost that I cared about are ones on my ex-housemate's PS3. It needed to be sent for fixing, but certain game saves couldn't be backed up externally (Heavy Rain for example). They sent back a refurbed console as they couldn't fix his.

I use the Steam cloud to back up PC saves, and I also back up my Documents folder fairly often (which is where most of my saves are)

Yeah, 2 missions left for the GTA 4 ending and BAM my hard drive screws himself and I have to re-install windows. Later I found out that the problem that made me format my computer was bad blocks. Damn those bad blocks!

Try saving a backup of your saves from games you really play on your computer once in a while.

"or have multiple saves, especially not for a console game" I dont have that kind of issue, just always make backups and use multiple save slots, its not that hard.

Dead Island do i need to say more.

I was robbed and lost a lot of data on both the PC and my game consoles.

I played Thief all the way up to the final level, and then the hard drive crashed. When I finally got a replacement, I had to play through the entire game, again. I didn't bother taking as much care and pilfering everything the second time through....

I did learn to put saved games (and games in general) on a secondary drive, however, so it turned out to be a valuable experience. Now, my HDD can crash and I still have all the data from my games.