What issues? None. I've had 3 saves completely borked by updates, to the point where they were lost forever. But I don't take the game that seriously, so I just start a new save and move on.
Keep in mind that even if you lose a save, your favorite sims are still saved in your library; you can start over with them
I like your playstyle that can move on and enjoy new things without worrying.
I don't know how your save and others' save can break because I haven't experienced this level of game break until now. I'm quite new compared to many people here, I start in 2021. So, I still think that just backing up a save file is enough.
But after reading your reply and previous replies, I found that I should back up "households/sims" as well. Because most of population in my game are generated townies that I edited in CAS later. They don't have a backup in the Gallery manually. They are all important to me, so backing up will help me be able to bring them to the new save when I "have to" move on.
Yeah, I had typed that post out in wordpad lol.
But yeah, for me, most of the sims I've made have a save in my library/gallery, like: "Straudred 1"for example. I'm still on the road to creating another save since the ones with the teens who finished highschool were a bit bloated by various flavors of self created sims who I hadnt really touched. Figured some of those were the biggest problem and got rid of some.
My Yopson save, I did a save as and new savefile for that as well as deleted some of the older "not in this world" households that were cluttering, hopefully, I should be able to play him without hangs soon. All the saves with my first vampire seem to be good...
I should mention I have roughly 3 to 10 saves depending on the particular version of back up, but I'm back to using the original latest version of saves which had managed to bloat to nearly 1gb in size before I started trimming away at the excess.
For me, it just appears right now as if the issues were mainly centered around over population on the household management system, because I typically dont bother putting the "exiled" groups of offspring or other sims, in houses. Glad I was able to provide some help or suggestions of where to look for issues.
Excuse me, I want to make sure: Did your save file's size reach 1GB? (I mean one save file, not a save folder). Because mine is 21MB for save file that has under 700 sims. But I didn't keep "photo items" in inventory because they are real culprit for the bloating file's size.
Photos are picture files but sims and lots (without mods) data are text. So, the impact is very different.
Your playstyle probably needs to split household members into different save files to make sure that you can keep everything properly. If you have more details about your managing methods that you want to share, feel free to share, it's good for me to learn!
Saving all your lots and sims in your personal gallery is valuable. You can rebuild worlds faster.
It's wise to have several back up saves.
I don't want to rebuild the save file very soon because I want to keep the relationship of my townies in the game (I love to see them introduce themselves and become friends without my control). But I will save backup all lots and sims in case TS4 update may break the save files someday. (San Myshuno case is almost the point where I'm scared)
I have a backup save every day (some days I have 2-3 if I played a lot) unless that day I did only minor CAS edits. It's useful when I want to recheck my progress when I update stories in Google sheet.
After seeing the big change if I install L&D, I plan to saving every lots and sims before let L&D be a part of my main file. I still want to learn this pack details (and impacts) from reviewing youtube and forums. So, I don't have to play soon. Safety first! 😂
