What is the best way to save your game?

I generally tend to do at least 6-10 saves and rotate between them sequentially using NRAAS Saver to remind me to save. And I religiously use "Save As" to create those new saves.

I usually have 4 saves (something like "Hidden Springs 1 - 4") and rotate between them in a play session, normally saving every night after overwatch did its thing. If something special is happening I do an additional save. I back up my saves on an external hard drive.
Normally I don´t have much more than the saves I´m using at the moment in the actual Sims 3 "saves" folder, the others are moved to another backup folder.

I use save as and have several 'master saves' that are saved on desktop in a separate file and that are copied to a external drive for safe keeping. The master saves are usually after a significant event like a birth, move or marriage, or renovating the house for the 5th time. :)

I label my saves with date MH (stands for the world) 11318 (date) rafeprop1(which stands for Rafeproposes1,if I save in the middle of his proposal because I have to leave or something it will change to 2 at the end. I can get kinda stupid about saving as I lost a bunch of stuff when I first started by not doing save as and having errors and many bad saves.

My masters would be labelled MH11318rafeprop3MAS. All saves go to a desktop folder. I try to keep the folder in the game with only 1or 2 of any of my games. The desktop folder gets culled weekly when I remember, and the masters are copied to the external and am hoping to set up a cloud. Need to do that this weekend!

I use "save as" and always play the newest one. I only have one game going at a time. I keep two saves of the same game in the main menu and delete everything else.

I use save as and back up previous saves into their own folder

I almost never use "save as". Instead at the beginning of a session I will make a copy of the game I intend to play renaming it. So if I intended to play a game named HS Rose2 the new copy I would be playing would be HS Rose3. Everything through my last play session would be saved in HS Rose2. Then throughout the current HS Rose3 session I would just save.

I don't cycle through old names but I do delete them eventually. I also periodically clean out the Saves folder of all lone ".backup" folders.

I generally keep 4 saves going, overwriting the oldest when I Save As. I tend to use the name of the world or last name of the family and append numbers, 1-4. I save about every 30 min. NRaas Saver reminds me to save and does the numbering automatically. Sometimes I'll make intermediate saves, particularly when I'm aging up sims. Those I designate with a letter and I'll delete those from the Saves folder eventually.

When my sims travel I make another save adding an abbreviation of where my sims are going (FR, CH, EG, ITF, Uni, etc.). I do that just before my sims travel just in case something goes wrong during the trip. I don't delete that save until my sims are safely back home. Then, while they are traveling I'll use the numbering system above with the new name to keep 4 new saves in the travel world.

For example, my current save is named after the family, the Goodwins. My saves are Goodwin-1, Goodwin-2, etc. If I'm on Goodwin-2 and my sims go to uni then I name the save just before they leave: Goodwin-2-Uni. When my sim arrive at university I start again, Goodwin-2-Uni-1, Goodwin-2-Uni-2, etc. Right before my sims travel home I make a last save, Goodwin-2-Uni-hm. When they safely arrive home I continue with the original scheme, Goodwin-3 would be the next save in this example. Eventually I'll go into the Saves folder and delete all the uni saves.

My system is kind of complicated but I generally keep at least 4 saves. When my sims travel I keep one save in homeworld before traveling until my sims return just in case something goes very wrong during the trip and I need to go back to a pre-travel save. And I always make a save just before returning home in case the traveling glitches and I need to repeat it.

This is my Saves folder.

https://i.imgur.com/hwvuFtc.png

I always 'save as', name the save after my sim and number files. Sometimes I add a word (like 'jodie', indicating Jodie had been born, or china when my sim's in China). I save as every sim night. When I save during the day (because of an important event I don't want to lose or because I had to stop playing in the middle of the sim day) I add a, b, c. As you can see I'm a bit sloppy where is comes to emptying the folder :s But I keep backups of all of them, untill the generation is played. Then I delete almost all of them, except for like five or so. I like to be able to go back into a save/family from the past if I want to. I hardly ever overwrite.

"xitneverendss;c-16262008" wrote:
Wow, thanks for the responses everyone! I typically do the same as most of you, rotating between about 4 saves. I just wasn’t sure if I should be deleting old saves in the process or whatnot. Seems like everyone has their own way of doing it and there’s really no “wrong way” (besides using save and quit of course lol).

@JoAnne65 that many saves would make my head explode! Haha

The reason I forget to move them is because I don’t see them haha.

"xitneverendss;c-16262008" wrote:
I just wasn’t sure if I should be deleting old saves in the process or whatnot. Seems like everyone has their own way of doing it and there’s really no “wrong way” (besides using save and quit of course lol).

The save game chooser screen has a limit on how many saves it can display. Too many saves in your Saves folder (50+) can cause issues. That's probably the only limitation to be aware of. For that reason I try to keep the number of saves in my Saves folder fairly small (less than 20). I'll move saves I want to keep to another drive in case I want to play that save again someday.