[RESOLVED WORKAROUND] the game has crashed and my saved games are dead

Sorry i'm french so i will put my french version and the "translation" in english ...

J'étais en train de jouer a ma partie qui dure depuis plus de 100 heures quand ce soir j'ai eu un message " le jeu a cesser de fonctionner " .
Cela m'a renvoyé sur steam ...
J'ai relancé le jeu et en voulant charger ma dernière partie toutes mes sauvegardes de mon hôpital sont désormais mortes et plus rien ne s'affiche dans l'image de prévisualisation ,  les dates et les heures de mes sauvegardes sont toutes identiques et erronées ( cela me dit que je suis au jour 12 et que j'ai 123456$ , et cela pour chacune de mes parties sauvegardées , ce qui est faux ).
J'ai un très bon pc et je sais que le problème ne vient pas de là ...
S'il vous plait aidez moi car je suis vraiment déçu et je n'ai pas le courage de tout recommencer alors que je travail sur cet hôpital depuis tout ce temps

I was playing my game which has been going on for over 100 hours when tonight I got a message "the game has stopped working".
It sent me back on steam ...
I restarted the game and wanting to load my last part but all my backups from my hospital are now dead and nothing is displayed in the preview image, the dates and times of my saves are all identical and incorrect (this tells me that I am on day 12 and that I have $ 123,456, and that for each of my saved games , which is wrong ).
I have a very good pc and I know that the problem does not come from there ...
Please help me because i am really disappointed and i don't have the courage to start all over again while i have been working on this hospital for all this time  

Je précise que lorsque je clique sur le bouton " charger " rien ne se passe , rien ne se lance "
I specify that when I click on the button "load" nothing happens, nothing starts "

Hi, welcome to the forum and thanks for the bug report!

While I don't remember seeing a similar problem, we can try the following steps:
- backup your saves folder (here's how you can find it on your machine: https://projecthospital.forumotion.com/t717-how-to-report-bugs)
- check if there's anything else than the .zip files, delete the non-zip files, try loading your save again
- if this doesn't help, you can try unzip the save xml (it will have the same name as the zip) by hand and try to load it in the game

In case this still doesn't help, could you please send us your latest save and the log file so we can have a detailed look? Info about the file locations is in the link above. Thanks in advance!

Hello, thank you for your answer !
Last night I followed the procedure to find the backup files but my pc warns me that it is risky to open these files ...?
I also found the bug report, I converted it to a zip but I can't reach it here ...
cordially

your solution worked for me, I had 3 non-zip files in the backups, I deleted them and my backups returned to normal.
Do you have any idea why I had these 3 files in my backups?
cordially

Hi, just a quick explanation/speculation about what happened: the game always unzips the save to load the info about it and the save game xml itself, that part is pretty normal.

If something went wrong (and now I'm not sure what could possibly cause this, maybe a crash exactly while the game was saving an autosave or some problem with access rights or maybe - but not likely - antivirus going wild?), and if one of the files got corrupted or marked read-only, it could prevent the games to be loaded in the future. Anyway, we're glad the workaround helped and hopefully this won't repeat in the future.

thank you for this additional information and thank you for your quick responses
I will still be able to have fun in my hospital for a few hundred hours