Hey I had to wipe my hard drive so I backed up my save folder from Torchlight 1 before wiping it. When I re-installed TL and put my save folder back, the character was not up to date. My character was at the level she was over a day ago and I had played several hours since that time. I didn't back up the save until after that, right before the hard drive wipe. So I am at a loss as to why I lost several hours of play. Does TL only backup your character every so often?

Maybe you did backup the wrong file?

You have 0.SVT which is the ACTUAL file (for your first character)
the backup.tmp is in case of crash and might be older
and sharedstash.bin I think is obvious :D the shared stuff between the characters.

And the files are normally either updated on a manual save and on exit. (and certain intervals which I am not sure about, but one IIRC entering a new level)

So if you are using the backup it might explain it....

Manual save? How do you manually save your game? I thought it saved progress in real time. Whenever I exit and log back in, my character is in the same spot I left it.

I copied the entire contents of the Save folder. Now when I first re-installed TL, I pasted the save folder back into the proper place. However each time I loaded the game, it did not show my character nor did it allow me to load it. So what I did was make a new character, then I tried the copy+paste again. This time it worked, but my character was the older version.

ok, bad wording of my part ;)
Whenever you quit to the main menu it is being saved. So no need to leave the game for saving and as you come back in the same spot I worded it manual save.

How many files did you zip? The three I mentioned?
And AFAIK those are the only files being used.

I sounds like that your save might be a bit corrupt and hence not recognising the 0.svt and reverting back to the backup. (check the zip for date and time and see if this matches with my theory). Had this once over a while as well, hence I always made manual (here we go again ;) ) zip backups while playing....

If you make your file available (rename the ending and place it here on GOG) I could give it a try.

Yeah I noticed that the time stamp on the save was the day before, as if the game never saved my final session. So i guess it was just corrupt?

Also, if I put this save into a game with existing saves, can I just change that number from 0 to whatever and it will be fine?

I don't know why, but Torchlight 1 has some saving problems, first I thought it doesn't like SSD, but nope, seems to be just a general bug. Hence I always try to 'manual' save like every 15-30 minutes (alt-tab and make a zip of the save)

Actually 0 IS the game. So if you screwed up in the game, you would need to rename the backup to 0. I think the devs wanted to implement a backup function like 0, 1 ,2 and so on but aborted this idea.....

the 0 file includes everything BUT this stash box in the north of the village. Bit stupid, but IIRC even multiple characters are saved in 0. The only case when TL is NOT loading 0 is, if the file is corrupt and then it reverts back to the backup file.

OK, so what you're saying is that the 0 file contains all the saves for the game.

So if I have Game A with 3 characters, and Game B with 2 characters, I can't copy file 0 from Game A to Game B to have a game with 5 characters. I'd overwrite Game B entirely and have only Game A, correct?

Hey just thought I'd let you know, it IS possible to copy saves from other Torchlight installations to others with existing saves. When I got home from the hospital, I noticed I had 5 characters on my home PC installation, in 0-4.SVT. All I did was change the save I'd made on my laptop at the hospital from 0.SVT to 5.SVT and it's now listed with my other toons.