Tell us about your worst save file disasters

We've all been there at least once. That sinking feeling when your PC won't boot, and the drive's making that sickening clicking noise, and your mind starts racing with all the things you could've backed up and just never got around to. Those family photos. The next Great American Novel, still just a collection of ideas in a text file, but really good ideas. That save file for Lemmings with 350 hours logged. All that progress, gone, like tears in rain.

Losing a save file is a deep, scarring pain. Today we have it easy: services like Steam cloud and Dropbox make it easy to keep our save files safe and transferable between PCs. But it hasn't always been that way. The only way to heal old wounds is to exercise them, so we want you to share your most painful save file disasters.

Tell us about your deepest, darkest moments of despair, as your most coveted PC save disappeared into digital dust forever. We'll collect your comments below and share the most heartbreaking stories next week.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).