So I was playing Chrono Trigger for DS, and having a grand old time, when my cat stepped on my F1 key, and restored my game back to a state I'd saved last night, when I first started playing.

I thought "Well that sucks... Good thing I did a normal in-game save about 10 minutes ago, though!" So I did File -> Reset, intending to load said save game... and came upon a completely fresh "New Game" screen, with no save data at all.

I eventually realized that the reset action caused DeSmuMe to overwrite my in-game save file with the contents it would have had based on that loaded save state.

After some frustrated googling, I found a few forum threads on here that led me to believe I should restore my .dsv file from a backup, which I conveniently happened to have (from a few hours ago, sure, but that's still not so bad...). Unfortunately, even though I'm 100% certain that this file has a timestamp from after I started doing real in-game saves, putting it into the folder that DeSmuMe uses for .dsv files doesn't help. Starting the game up again leads me to a fresh "New Game" screen.

The only weirdness I can think of about this was that I have an ooooold desmume.ini file, back from the last time I played Chrono Trigger about 10 years ago (I discovered this *after* this all happened, and have now deleted it and created a brand new one). The file paths in there were based on where my Games folder used to be, rather than where it had moved to since 2010. So the DSV file was in a different place than it normally would have been. I've tried putting my backup into that folder, but it doesn't help. I've tried editing the .ini file to make it use the new DeSmuMe folder for the "Battery" setting, but that also doesn't help. It's overwriting the copy of the backup that I put into the correct folder with new, blank save data when I quit the emulator, so it's clearly *supposed* to be loading same backup file when it loads the game. But I guess it's not?

What, if anything, can I do?

Also, can I configure DesMuMe to automatically back up .dsv files, so an errant reset while a bad save state is loaded doesn't blow away the only hard save data? Or perhaps configure it so loading a save state is (optionally) a more complex hotkey than just F1? Like, Ctrl-F1, so it can't be done by accident?

I'm using DeSmuME 0.9.5 x64 on Windows 7 64bit.  When I have the program installed at "D:\Games\DeSmuME.0.9.5-x64", everything works just fine.  However, when I had it in "D:\Games\Emu\DS\DeSmuME.0.9.5-x64" I'd get an error every time I tried to make a savestate.  In addition, the program would silently fail to write to .dsv files for the ROMs I was playing, which meant that the in-game save function would think it was saving properly, but every time I re-started the ROM, it would do the "initializing data" screen, and there would be no "Load Game" option.  The strange thing is that I was able to make a "Save State As..." file just fine, in the D:\Games\Emu\DS\ROMs folder (not the same folder that DeSmuME was installed at when this issue was occurring)

My first thought was that the folder was set as Read-Only by the filesystem, so I made sure to turn that off.  That didn't fix it.  I knew the savestate system worked, because I'd used it when I first extracted DeSmuME's zip file, but before I'd moved it to my "D:\Games\Emu\DS" folder.  So I kept trying different things, like running DeSmuME as admin, and other such stuff.  Finally, I just moved the folder back to "D:\Games" which was where I'd first extracted it, and now it works fine.

Can anyone think of why this file saving issue was happening?  The only thing I can think of is that the D:\Games folder has existed on my hard drive for years, but I only created the D:\Games\Emu folder (and it's subfolders) today.  Maybe there's some weird issue with folders that were created by Windows 7?  The partition is NTFS.

The game I've been having this issue with is Chrono Trigger DS, in case that's meaningful.  But I haven't played anything else yet, so I don't know if this issue affects other games or not.