In the original, there only ever was ONE save game. Ever. And yes, it (original and this one) autosaves when you hit "yes" to enter a new location.

It also autosaves when you Radio in for promotions. Found this out the hard way when I accidentally hit 'R' with half my characters mortally wounded or worse... Luckily I was able to leg it over to the doc's in needles to heal them up before they kicked the bucket.

Is there any way to back up the save files?

My guess it's the file called lastsave in the appdata folder (windows 7)\inxile entertainmaint\wasteland

I was REALLY hoping they'd address this, what with all the changes they made. I have had to restart the game before, thanks to a poorly timed autosave, of which I could not have predicted would be fatal. That's sheer madness!

I might leave windows explorer open and backup the save file every so often.

The game saves into the GAME1 and GAME2 data files. The "lastsave" file just tells the game which folder contains the current game files to play from.

So if you want to back up your save, just make a copy of the entire directory:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\inXile entertainment\Wasteland\USERNAME

The above path is for Win7. Not sure what it is on WinXP.

There's really no way for them to adjust how the autosave works without rewriting the game significantly. It's due to the limitations of the platform it was written for at the time. Since the game keeps track of the state of the world with who's dead/alive, what items were left where, what was blown up, etc, it has to save this information back to the disk all the time. The only way to maintain consistency is to save the characters at the same time, otherwise you could wind up with a situation where you took a quest-critical item, saved the world data and not the characters, then exited the game, thus losing the item forever and making the game unwinnable.

Well, maybe, but it's just as bad to discard your characters and start over. I'm not all that into Ironman mode. Even just NOT autosaving on map change would fix the issue I have entirely. Even that wouldn't work? But hey, I'll play it how it was made, regardless.

This was originally an Apple II game. It had to fit in 64KB of memory, so you couldn't fit both maps in RAM at the same time, so it would save out the area you're leaving to disk and then load in the new area.

Just discovered the hard way.. and now discovered the hard way of the "Reset" function...

Yeah I am so damn pissed at this game!! 1 save and it auto saves so I lost one of my hardest to roll characters! Tried reset utility and it doesn't work at all! It does NOTHING! It stops responding! I'm regretting purchasing this game it's so horrible! Any game with 1 save should never have a damn auto save! That is just retarded!

You know, once upon a time, some of us played this game on a computer WITH NO HARD DRIVE.

You think a bum save is annoying now? LOL.