I recently reinstalled Grim Dawn on my new computer (a week or so ago.) Yay for cloud saves, all my characters are there, and I can load them up and play them! But once I leave the game, their progress disappears. All drops, experience, items in the shared bank... they all go poof, and my character loads back into the exact same save state that I started in - right down to the location of items in the inventory. I can play the characters in multiplayer as well, with identical results. I simply cannot get their save states to update.

New characters do not have this problem. I have started several characters, and they work fine, in and out of multiplayer. I can move items from the shared bank, and it works perfectly for those characters, even for items stored in the past. But my older characters cannot effect any changes to any saved state. They load in and play just fine, then the progress disappears upon exiting the character, whether to desktop or the main menu.

I've looked up people having similar issues a few years back, due to an antivirus software being screwy about read-only files - but I don't use that AV (I have Norton) and I can't find any read-only files in my save folder.

So in summary:
I recently reinstalled;
I'm not using any mods;
I can't find any read-only or write-protected files in my saved games directory.
My characters from before the reinstall cannot make any changes to save states - including changes to the shared bank. They can be loaded and played, even in multiplayer, but all changes they make simply disappear, even for the shared bank (I have not yet tested this last effect in multiplayer games.)
Only my pre-reinstallation characters are thus affected.
The shared bank works fine for my newly-created characters.

I'm totally stumped on this, and a bit annoyed. I'm playing with friends who are new to the game, so it's not the end of the world that my level 85 Demolitionist main from when I last played is some kind of Force ghost now - but I would really like to be able to use those characters.

It doesnt have to do with "read only" files,
Antivirus Software, Norton, too, "protects" system folders and GD is not allowed to write there, so you have to add it as exception in your software.

Except that the same folder contains my new characters, and they are unaffected. Do you know where I would check to see if Norton is affecting the files?

Exclude the game from being checked by Norton and I'd turn off cloud saving as well. I don't know how well GOG's version works, but the Steam one can screw up with the game. Also verify the game files.

Cloud saving in GOG does work pretty well, its different from Steam, the Cloud just stores copies of the local saves, thus even tools work properly.

I dont know how Norton does it, either you have to add the grimdawn.exe to allowed apps to write in protected folders or you have to remove the folders from protection. Norton should keep logs where you can see what was "prevented" and there you should see what to do. Those saves werent created buy GD but by Galaxy ;)

(EDIT: Adding Grim Dawn.exe to the "Process Exclusion" list in Norton fixed my issue! Thanks a ton for your help!)

That... sadly makes sense. Huzzah for overzealous antivirus software that's intentionally more abstruse every update! I suspect that they don't want the uninitiated to make changes and then blame their software when things go wrong. I had to use the Search function to find "auto-protect exclusion" (just searched "exclusion") and then added the entire Games folder in my GoG directory.

Which did not work. So I added the actual "Grim Dawn.exe" file. Still doesn't work. Let me see if I need to restart somehow...

Still doesn't work. Turned Norton Auto-protect off completely...

Still doesn't work. Norton's History doesn't mention Grim Dawn's executable, but it does mention "C:\PROGRAM FILES\WINDOWSAPPS\MICROSOFT.GAMINGSERVICES_3.59.11001.0_X64__8WEKYB3D8BBWE\GAMINGSERVICES.EXE,5992,C:\Program Files\Norton Security\Engine\22.21.10.40\WSCStub.exe,30764,Access Process Data,Unauthorized access blocked"

Helpful.

Hm... maybe Norton is stupid enough to block a process called by an executable I've told it is ok to run...

Yup. That's it. I had to add Grim Dawn.exe to the excluded processes list, even though it told me that Auto-Protect, Script Control, SONAR, and Download intelligence would ignore it. Whee!

HOWEVER, thank you guys for the help! I don't think I ever would have figured out what was wrong if you hadn't advised me, since it never occurred to me that the game files originated from different applications/processes, or that this would somehow matter.

Happy it finally worked, now have fun with this great game ... I do lik it really much, especially Pet build :)

It's an exceptional game. An improvement on Diablo 2, in my opinion, and that's the gold standard for games of this type.