Save data

Games (and other applications) can store small amounts of data while they’re running; Kate refers to this as “Save Data”, since it’s often used to record your progress in the game.

Save data in Kate is not stored in files, but rather internally in the console’s database. It’s then divided into Partitions. All cartridges have an “unversioned” partition, which can be read by any version of the cartridge, and also one partition for each version of the cartridge that you install.

These versioned partitions allows you to safely upgrade cartridges, without having to worry about your save data being corrupted. If you upgrade, and it turns out that the new version doesn’t work as you expect, you can also re-install the previous version and continue from where you left it off—no data for that version will have changed.

Managing stored data

Save data is associated with a specific cartridge, so you can manage it from the cartridge’s storage screen. You can get to this screen by pressing (Berry button) to bring up the context menu, selecting Settings -> Storage, and then the cartridge you want. Or by using the Manage Data option for a cartridge in the library. When you’re running a cartridge, the Storage button in the context menu will also work.

The cartridge storage page includes a summary of all data related to the cartridge that Kate is storing; you can check the save data in particular by using the Manage save data button.

From the save data management screen you can delete all save data used by the cartridge. This is an irreversible operation: once you delete it, it’s gone, and there’s no way of recovering the data. Your cartridge will run as if it was the first time you opened it at all.

Note

Cartridges can store data in any format, so there’s no way for Kate to provide acces to delete parts of the data. If Kate allowed that, it would not be able to guarantee that the resulting save data would still be usable.