Here's a few things about my server before I talk about the issue:

- I have restarts set for every 3 hours to keep the server running smoothly
- My saves are backed up every 2 hours and saved for 3 days before deleting
- The back up files are 16mb each
- Before the resets that happened today, the server was at 11gbs before the restart happened
- The restart that we first noticed having an issue with was made today @ 12pm pacific
- Nothing indicates there's hacking our foul play on the behalf of my players
- Palworld did have an update, but that was done at 9pm pacific the day before, since then, there have been 6 resets before the error occured
- Other server hosts I've talked to (People with servers on different platforms), have not had this issue either
- I did not make any changes or even touch the server, since 12am pacific that same day.


The Problem
 At 12pm Pacific, my server went through it's normal reset that happens every 3 hours. However, after this happened, everyone's save file AND map information, was wiped. I did not set it to happen this way, it just kind of happened on its own. First thing I did was check logs for errors, couldn't find anything myself. Next thing I checked, was back ups. This is what I found: https://imgur.com/zAABJ3f . The back up that happened 30 minutes after the reset, showed 243kb instead of 16gb, telling me everything was wiped.

I've talked to friends that own servers for other providers, such as Nitrado and Gportal, and they don't have this issue and have been running their server for a longer period of time. Their back ups are at 27mb as they have bigger servers. I haven't seen anyone having this issue on palworld's end either. This leads me to conclude it has to be my server host.

My solution at this moment is to make the restarts happen every 12 hours, and manually back up the save before the restart, then restore that back up when the server comes on. This is manual work on my end but I'm willing to do it for the people on my server. Just sucks that I have to at the moment.

Has anyone else run into this yet? Any potential solutions? I've ran aground with the stuff I can do with what I know about.

At current, there are multiple known save file corruption bugs and a few unknown for PalWorld.

There are a NUMBER of documented fixes depending on the cause of the corruption. Everything from process interruptions to just simple Player actions causing the bug. A quick google for palworld save corruption brings up nearly a million results and the first page brings up 4 discussions on issues, causes, and fixed from multiple platforms and hosts. Listed at the end of this post are just those first four, but as someone who is self hosting (for family), and hosting two public servers here, playing single player for testing, and playing with some friends via Gamepass on tethered sessions (friends who don't have Steam and/or couldn't afford $30 for the game), I can assure you it's not just this host running into the issue. I can also assure you that file size isn't something that appears to be associated with causing corruption, and I've only known from a size thing that number of active dungeons hitting passed 20 or the previous bug of hitting 7000+ captured entities on a server, have anything close to a capacity issue.

The game is early access, riddled with bugs and poorly optimized. It's hella fun though, so basically recommended you do at least a backup of the server every hour, a restart every 24 hours at a scheduled time at bare minimum, and for lower populations having the server shutdown on idle, or using the new panel to restart the server daily upon idle is a good idea., (and increase restart frequency based upon player count. 12 hours for up to 4 players, 6 hours for up to 8, and anything beyond that 3 hours is recommended.)

I've not yet been hit by the bug on one of my two servers here. That server is default settings and vanilla, and password protected. My other server with increased rates, higher difficulty, and minor mods vai SFTP has been corruptedon save 4 times so far. Each time it sucks, and each time our server has lost a few hours of work, and in some cases some pals just gone.

And yeah, it sucks. But the same thing happened on my solo game, and on my Xbox save. The game has been out in what amounts to a paid open beta test for -almost- a three full weeks now. It took ARK years to be stable, 7 Days to Die is still in Alpha and has bugs from Alpha 0.3 still floating around in the code, and Valheim... well their Discord just got hacked not too long ago and is mostly a ghost town now.

The point is, this is the price we pay as Gamers to play games before they're finished. We have to bascially treat it like a new disease, figure out what works, and move forward while we can. And I don't know where you're getting your info, but the offiical servers even aren't immune to this issue.

But yeah, just being a good admin is about all we can do. Keep settings sane, take regular backups, and due to one of the -worst- mememory leaks I've seen since Crystal Isles, reboot the server as often as sanely possible.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Palworld/comments/19dduv5/getting_tired_of_corrupted_saves_on_official/

https://gbatemp.net/threads/palworld-dedicated-server-save-corruption-fix.646958/

https://www.gamingbible.com/news/palworld-player-issues-warning-about-new-update-587614-20240130

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1623730/discussions/0/4203615689068041995/

https://www.gearupbooster.com/blog/address-palworld-file-corruption-issues.html

https://commonsensegamer.com/palworld-corrupted-save-fix-hcfe/

server randomly  wipes for ark also, no reply from emails..  after 7 years with them i am leaving for another hosting company...

AKR random wipes is a thing that is due to WildCard bug introduced int ASE when Fjordur was added to teh game. Host has nothing to do with it, and in part is why the Official Cluster was shut down, as the number of rollbacks they had to keep doing was almost weekly.

that  may explains the wipes, they only started a few months ago and fjordur has been out for quite sometime. still should have responded to e-mails to explain things..

Yeah, not sure why support may be slow to respond. But I can attest that there's a bug that happens since Fjordur released that has introduced a nasty save corruption bug. Sadly, no one in the modding community was able to nail it down before ASA released, and after the last "official" map for ASE was completed (before it released) all of the developers were moved from ASE to ASA except for one, in case of catastrophic bug fixes, as in, they do some type of holiday patch and the whole thing just wiped everyone's game, or caused the game to be unplayable (basically their job was to prevent massive refunds.) And that dev was left on ASE part time, and spent the rest of their time on ASA.

When ASA was deemed ready for early release (October last year), even that dev was moved from ASE part time.

At this point, we're 99.9999% never getting another ASE patch, unless it's something VERY simple, and very shady. Like putting an ad on the title screen telling us all to go and watch the new ARK T.V. series, or an ad on the title screen telling us that ARK 2.0 is coming, or ASA has an all time sale, or something equally frustratingly petty.

Your best bet for now, due to how the bug presents is to do some type of backup of your save every 2 hours, and do a daily restart on the server. When the save becomes corrupted, it doesn't immediately cause an issue, as the save file doesn't get reloaded.

EXCEPT, when the next save happens. 

When the next save happens, the game loads the last known good save and just appends the data on the end.

This means that if your server runs from Sunday to Saturday, then reboots every Sunday morning, you could have your save get corrupted on Tuesday, and then every save after that is also corrupted. Then come Sunday morning, when the corrupted save tries to load, your entire progress is lost.

If you do daily reboots, you'll be able to be certain that at most you'll lose a days progress.
If you do backups every 2 hours, then you know that if the corruption bug hits you, that you have check points every 2 hours, so you might not lose an entire day, you may lose only 2 hours, or 20 hours (some multiiple of two.)

And yeah, it sucks. It's why I'm playing 7 Days and Palworld in my spare time, and letting my community call the shots for my ARK Server.