How to prevent Borderlands 3 save file loss

Borderlands 3 is the 4th Borderlands title to be launched, and it manages to keep the franchise as successful as ever.

However, no game series is without flaws, and Borderlands 3 has its own fair share.

Fortunately, history shows us that any issue that arises can be handled in one way or another.

Several players have reported on the official Gearbox forums that their save files have disappeared entirely without a trace.

I was trying to launch the game but it say my save was corrupted and lost my progress and was reset back from lvl 43 to 34 and reset back to story even though me and my friends finished the story.

This is an overarching problem, as you lose story progress, golden keys, your character levels and so forth.

It would seem that players get notified that their save file became corrupted.

What causes the Borderlands 3 save file corruption?

Players on Twitter have reported problems after activating cloud saves that then either wiped progress completely or rolled back to an earlier save point.

If you are playing Borderlands 3 with Cloud Saves on more than one device through the Epic Games Launcher, you may experience Cloud Save conflicts. 

What is a Cloud Save conflict?

Cloud Save conflicts are mainly the result of you playing the game on one machine while in offline mode.

After much research, it was discovered that the source of the problem is actually a whole different issue.

It seems that a bug is keeping the Cloud Save conflicts pop-up screen from showing up.

This makes it so that the cloud saves end up being chosen by default, leading to progress rollback or even a complete wipe.

What to do in case of a Borderlands 3 Cloud Save conflict

Once a Cloud Save conflict appears, you would normally be prompted with a window that looks something like this:

You need to pay attention to the timestamps  and choose the most recent one.

You could also just simply look for the one with the Newer label in front of the time stamp.

In the end, it seemed that this entire issue boils down to players experiencing one of two things:

• Choosing the wrong save files when prompted with a Cloud Save conflict
• Not getting the chance to choose the save file at all