I just lost a very promising 19th level character ready for an Ultra ending--finished Gaab'bay's quests, just ready to get crowned Lawful with fire immunity. I lost the character because the game crashed and I hadn't thought to back up the save file.

Okay, I know I should've backed up the save file, but can't situations like this be prevented? Your character can get completely wiped because of a power outage or a game crash because the game deletes the save file when you load the game, then creates it again when you save. What if, instead, it kept the save file, updated it when you saved, and deleted it only when the character died? That way, a power outage or crash would simply put you back to whenever you last saved.

The way things are now, you're encouraged to halfway savescum to prevent from losing your character due to a crash or outage. You have to back up the save file, then restore from the save file if the game crashes. Both of the times I've won the game, I had to recover from one or more crashes.

No game this complex can be made absolutely bug-free, and even if it could be, you still couldn't stop the cat from stepping on the power strip and killing your character (no treats for you today, Tiger).

Why can't this be changed? Sensible ADOM players will back up their save files. Can't the game do that for us, just keeping the old save file until the new one is successfully stored, and deleting it when a character dies?