Big Walk Corrupted Save — Recover It with Windows Previous Versions

Power cut mid-session, game crash, or an abrupt shutdown can leave a Big Walk save refusing to load. Before you delete anything: Windows' built-in Previous Versions feature keeps enough history to roll the save back, and this is exactly how we recovered our own world after an outage.

Where the saves live

Open File Explorer, paste this into the address bar, and press Enter:

C:\Users\YOUR-USERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\House House\Big Walk\user_data\save_games

(You can also use the shorter %userprofile% form from the saves guide.) This folder holds one .sav file per world.

The recovery steps

1. Right-click the save_games folder → Properties → Previous Versions.
2. Browse the list of dated snapshots. If Windows has a version from before the corruption, you are in business.
3. Use "Open" first — do not hit Restore. Opening the snapshot in place lets you dig out the old .sav file and copy it to your desktop as a backup.
4. Copy the old .sav over the current, broken one in save_games (rename the broken file first, keep it as a fallback).
5. Launch Big Walk and load the world. Your group should be back at the moment of the chosen snapshot.

If it worked — and if it did not

If the world loads: make a manual copy of the working .sav right now, and turn on File History or any folder backup for AppData\LocalLow so future snapshots accumulate automatically.

If Previous Versions shows nothing, the folder history was never enabled — options are thin at that point. Check whether the game's cloud sync kept an older copy on another machine you play on, and only then consider starting the world fresh. Either way, do not delete the corrupted .sav until you are certain nothing else can be pulled from it.

Prevention beats recovery: hosts carry the only copy of the world (the host rules are explained in the saves guide), so the host's PC is the one that needs the backup habit.