Can't load in existing retroarch config. If you do it delibrately overwrites it losing years of save data

[s1nistr4]

As of today it is impossible to back up your retroarch config folder and restore it.

How to reproduce

1. Copy everything in retroarch ./config folder
2. Paste it somewhere
3. Delete the retroarch config.
4. Restore the retroarch .config file to the proper config location
5. Open it. It'll take your existing config, completely delete it and write its own.

Idk if it's signature verification or something but it should at least try to read the past config. I can't load any save states or any data via retroarch without this functionality so my game progress is pretty much lost for what looks like a badly implemented security measure for tampering with config data, even though the app is open source and mostly offline anyway

[hizzlekizzle]

This doesn't sound related to anything we've done lately, and none of us are able to reproduce the behavior.

Can you bisect and find a version that doesn't do the behavior (and when that behavior changed)?

[XerTheSquirrel]

There is no signature verification or otherwise in RetroArch with configuration files and save data. There are no security measure of any kind that would prevent you from editing your configurations and save data.

If you are using a version of RetroArch, say from Snap or Flatpak, it may be using a hardlinked, symlinked, or virtualized directory either defaulting to its own or otherwise not able to read the configuration and cache directories. If this is the case, check the contents of the Flatpak/Snap storage for RetroArch and move/delete the internal directory as that takes precedence over external ones.