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up vote 4 down vote favorite

All console games warn players at the beginning of any game:

Please do not turn off your console when you see the saving icon/indicator.

What if I turn it off or there occurs a power outage while saving data? What are the chances? Is it for sure that there will be a harm in every case?

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1  
<Soapbox> Saving to new file, doing a rename shuffle to swap the new file into the old files place, and only then deleting the old version is a very old io pattern. If done correctly there shouldn't be any risk that you'd end up with a corrupt save file. journaling file systems provide similar levels of protection at that level. There's no reason a modern consumer device should allow the user to corrupt data by power cycling during an io write. – Dan Neely Mar 15 '12 at 21:09

5 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

You could either lose or corrupt the data you are attempting to save. If the game is overwriting an existing file, this could mean that you will not be able to recover it.

Additionally if the console does not have a method for deleting the corrupted data you could wind up with inaccessible portions of your storage device.

It will mess up the ph balance in your pool. (Ok, not the last one).

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up vote 4 down vote

Very best case? Your game won't save.

You also run the risk of corrupting your game files, which means that you would have to start your entire game over from scratch.

People have also reported that you can corrupt the entire hard drive of your console, which would mean buying a new console. This is a rare case, but it isn't something I would personally want to risk.

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If you manage to corrupt the entire hard drive, you can just reformat it - no need to buy a new console. (It is very annoying to lose all your installed games and save data though, to be sure.) – fluffy Mar 15 '12 at 18:58
up vote 1 down vote

The same thing that can always happen when power is lost in a write operation; the data you're rewriting (your save data) can be corrupted, which is generally permanent.

It won't always happen, and there's usually reasonable protections made to stop damage from being done, but it's still not a good idea.

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up vote 0 down vote

You run a high risk of your save becoming corrupted and then not being able to recover the save.

While this may only apply to your auto save file it still is not recommended to do at any time.

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up vote 0 down vote

If you turn off your console while saving data, your data will be lost or corrupt in some cases.

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