I’ve had a recurring issue that’s causing me to lose MASSIVE progress through Fallout 4. I am confident it is not the fault of the SPECIFIC GAME, but is related to an issue with how Cloud Saves work (or don’t). At this point, I cannot progress further through the game without figuring out a remedy for this. I’ve lost roughly 12-15 hours of gameplay TWICE. In a month.

I play the game off and on, make progress for several days, even weeks. During this time, I also play other games -this means that I exit the game to load others on the same Steam Deck. I rarely play on my PC these days, because I’m not always at home, and I don’t always want to sit at my desk to play a game. Sometimes I exit the game natively through its own menu, other times I close the game view the Steam Deck menus. The issue does not seem to be triggered by either of these methods. Occasionally the Steam Deck has trouble resuming if the game is left running when it is turned off, but when I reload my latest save is typically fine.

Last Thursday, I loaded up the game, and discovered that my most current auto save was over a week old, and none of the manual “New Save” files where there anymore. I had made a LOT of progress over the last week, and this was supremely frustrating, I nearly put the game down for good at that point. Later that day, I decided to pick it back up, and try to ow through the portions I’d done over the past week faster (being more recently familiar with the segments can obviously save time). Over the holiday weekend, I managed to get through the large swath of narrative progress I’d made in the evenings over the past week, and even a little bit further. I made sure to create entirely new save files every few hours, because I suspected that I might have done something stupid that accidentally override my auto save/quick save. I wasn’t going to take any chances losing so much progress again.

Last night, I loaded the game up and… my latest save is roughly two weeks old. It is literally older than the latest save that was left from the last time this occurred. None of the New Saves I created (and had loaded from a few times over the weekend) are there anymore. If I put my Deck into desktop mode, and go to Stream’s remote storage page (didn’t post the link because I’m not sure if that’s allowed, but there’s only one page for that so I’m sure people can figure out what I’m talking about). I can find the game there in my account, but the newer saves are flat out missing there as well. The newest save file there is literally from November 15th (I am posting this on the 28th, in case anyone stumbles onto this later). My account still shows various achievements that I unlocked during the last two weeks, but I would need to redo all of that a third time in order to progress -its already pretty tough to want to play through the same 12-15 hour chunk of narrative a third time in a row, but if I can’t get this thing to stop clearing my saves then there’s REALLY no point in trying to play it (or any other story driven game) again.

I don’t know what’s causing this, but from what I’m finding online it seems to be some kind of cloud sync issue. Is there any way to recover these missing saves? And is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening again? If I can’t rely on the system to do something as simple as not screwing over my saves, then the thing is basically going to become a very expensive and frustrating paperweight. :(

Any genuine assistance would be MASSIVELY appreciated. I’ve really enjoyed this device, and I’d like to keep enjoying it. But this recent issue could be a real deal breaker that relegates an otherwise amazing device to the bin of shame.