#I don't mean to keep inquiring tech
river jay
that's fine
crude mulch
I don't windows much these days so I'm mostly going off memory, but the event log will have SMART and ntfs issues ntoed
here's a technet discussion about it, though msft technet is kind of butt so ymmv: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/where-do-i-find-the-summary-report-for-any-bad/e06aed4f-dbb0-4b55-bdc6-2680d3d7ca52
P.S. 7 and 55 are the auto repair codes where windows repairs disk errors silently on the fly. 52 is the SMART warning.
river jay
is this the correct place to be?
crude mulch
yup
river jay
uh ok
crude mulch
SMART messages are the disk self health check stuff, the other two codes are silent error correction
river jay
sorry if I'm misunderstanding this; a lot of new information is coming my way
so I'm looking for those eventid numbers in that technet discussion?
crude mulch
no, I mean that's what I looked at to figure out which event IDs corresponded to disk stuff
windows does not make any of this particularly easy
(it's why I don't windows for the most part)
river jay
yeah I think i'm a little off the rails right now.
crude mulch
heh
it's probably just some single block disk event that's fine
and you got unlucky
river jay
unlucky as in what are the odds of this occuring?
crude mulch
pretty low unless the drive is really old
and even then, I've got systems with the same drives for 10+ years that are doing fine
river jay
okay. well, I want to try and at least find information that satisfies my curiosity. in this event viewer, could you please repeat what I'm looking for again if you don't mind?
crude mulch
once is "huh", repeat offenses starts to be a bit more sketchy
river jay
I see
I hope I can prevent this though. would've been rough having my first 55 hour playthrough be gone like that and have no idea how to prevent this in the future, thankfully the autosaves were all intact.
crude mulch
it'll probably be something of event type 7, 52, or 55, and it'll be more recently than when you created that save
river jay
hopefully the autosaves being intact is a sign that it was just unlucky.
when I created the save? okay.
crude mulch
all that said, this is assuming that I/O error means some kind of disk read issue
that's generally the convention and I can't see why Wube wouldn't follow it, but technically I/O error just means "couldn't read"
river jay
I made the save at like 1-2 am but there's no errors in that area.
crude mulch
you also might see the error when you tried to read it, that will be the window that the event happened (and depends on if it got reported to the OS)
I'm a linux admin by trade and we have a joke that goes "do you know why they call it hardware? because it's hard"
dealing with hardware issues sucks
crude mulch
it's probably my least favorite part of the job
but yeah, I wouldn't sweat it too much unless it happens some more
river jay
I bet. this is all super vague and stuff, and maybe it's not worth even looking into if the problem isn't super blatant.
yeah, sounds about right.
crude mulch
especially because consumer hardware is pretty bad at reporting stuff, servers give a lot more diagnostic information but even then a lot of it boils down to "well, something happened all right..."
river jay
well, I appreciate your help. could you please repeat your advice for preventing something like this again? I know you did the shrug but I think you mentioned some things.
crude mulch
mostly just backups and keeping an eye on stuff
river jay
especially because consumer hardware is pretty bad at reporting stuff, servers g...
didn't know that. I'm far from tech-savy but I have seen into what you guys have to deal with.
crude mulch
(and fwiw, if you do lose your playthrough you'll blast through those 55 hours way faster, practice and all)
river jay
keeping an eye on stuff? for instance I always make sure that after I save my game and exit to main menu I can reload the save before I log off the game. does that suffice as an example?
because that's exactly what I did before I logged off on the corrupted save.
crude mulch
I mean if you start seeing other corruption or if you start getting messages on boot about "error was found and fixed"
river jay
oh ok.
crude mulch
that's a sign that your disk might be getting ready to keel over
iow: pay attention when the computer is complaining about stuff
river jay
sorry, just a couple more questions and I'll stop bothering ya.
in this case with my autosaves being fine, is relying on autosaves in the future going to be reliable in an event like this? could this error possibly have gone to one of my autosaves and not my main save?
crude mulch
it could have
I'm going to assume you don't know how disks are laid out, they are made up of blocks or sectors of a constant size (usually 4k) that files are written across
river jay
and also how do you recommend I backup my saves? like what process and where should I put my backups? do I save my game first, and then back up the save, and then save my non-backup save again to make them two seperate saved instances?
river jay
I'm going to assume you don't know how disks are laid out, they are made up of b...
you'd be assuming correctly.
but okay, noted
crude mulch
blocks can have faults on them for various reasons, if an empty block is errored and the disk tries to write to it, it'll get marked as bad and that data written elsewhere
if a block has a fault while there is data there it's either corrected (if enough recovery data exists to fix it) or it's corrupted, either way though the block is marked bad and what can be recoverd is moved elsewhere
(this all happens behind the scenes between the OS and the microprocessor on the disk that runs the drive itself)
river jay
so it's like taking a piece of a puzzle from the middle of the puzzle?
crude mulch
right
so my assumption here is that there's a spot on the disk that's bad (and has been marked as such, so it's not going to keep corrupting stuff) and it happened to have cropped up where your save game was
river jay
ah
crude mulch
these bad sectors can happen for all kinds of reasons, up to and including cosmic rays
river jay
then yeah that is unlucky
crude mulch
the fact that drives don't fail all the time is a marvel of engineering
river jay
man that's crazy if cosmic rays corrupted my game because space was threatened I was about to head up there
well, I really hope it was a fluke like that. I don't want to this to be a reoccuring problem.
typically this doesn't happen often with any other game, so it should be the same with factorio yeah?
crude mulch
anyway, for backups I generally recommend keeping everything important on like an external drive or something (not a thumb drive but an actual external hard drive) and making backups every now and then
for save games... eh
river jay
oh, so a completely different hard drive in terms of backing up?
I must've been backing up saves wrong this whole time then. I thought having the same save in two different file locations would suffice.
crude mulch
it's fine for small issues like this
but if the drive fails, the drive fails
again though, I don't consider saves to be particularly important data, not like photos or tax documents or whatever
river jay
fair, but for me personally this is my gaming computer, so strictly for gaming
crude mulch
well then, in that case backup (or not) is fine!
I don't back my gaming system up at all other than the steam cloud stuff because there's nothing there to lose
river jay
if I wanted to properly back up without using an external drive, is just creating a save copy in another file location fine?
crude mulch
yeah
it'll protect against single file corruption, it won't protect against drive failure
river jay
okay, does that make it further from the "block" so to speak? further than the zone where my data was possibly plucked out of?
crude mulch
maybe, but on modern drives things don't rot out predictably so locality doesn't really matter
what we see and how the drive decides to arrange itself are pretty unrelated to each other
river jay
I don't back my gaming system up at all other than the steam cloud stuff because...
ah, yeah I just assumed steam cloud was already doing it's thing for me. I guess it's different than what I imagined, but maybe I should look into that too.
crude mulch
especially with SSDs
river jay
okay
crude mulch
it probably was, but syncing data down from the cloud is something that only happens when you've deleted stuff
crude mulch
it's not doing consistency checks and data correction
river jay
sorry, if you don't have time I understand.
crude mulch
no worries, though I do need to scoot in a minute
river jay
alright I'll be quick.
so as far as save corruption goes, when does the save typically corrupt if it were to be corrupted? in this picture the save looks fine, and this is just after I saved the game, unlike the photo of the corrupted save which has no photo. if I clicked save and then tried to view the save from the load game menu, would I be able to tell right away if it was corrupted?
if you need clarification on this question I'll try and clarify.
basically I'm just asking if I can know ahead of time if something is corrupted.
crude mulch
you probably can tell ahead of time
I don't know the factorio save game data structure but it probably has checksum data in it (both to tell if it's broken but also if someone has made changes to it)
river jay
okay. before I logged off, the save photo was normal and it was my last location, so I assumed all was well.
crude mulch
so when you selected the busted one it didn't even try to load it because it knew something was wrong
even if it wasn't able to fix it
crude mulch
so yeah, working as intended even if your save was the victim
river jay
well, hopefully this doesn't happen again in the foreseeable future. this was my first and only red flag playing factorio so far, so I hope it was indeed just unlucky.
crude mulch
I have 2000 hours in Factorio and the problems have been very few and far between
river jay
good. again, thanks for the help.
river jay
weird, it had me confirm the EULA again.