Ok, I've got to ask the obvious question here. You lost a ship that seems to be the issue at hand and you want to restore it. From the way you talk about restoring the file you have admin priv. So why not find the ship destroy_entity and spawn a new one. You did save it and back it up or not?
Or is their some other reason escaping me you wanted to restore the file?
The only backup I had was the shipyard design to the point where the test sector became useless. I wanted to test the salvage beam collection speed, zero effect system and jump drive distance. To do that I had to construct the ship to take it into the real world for testing. When I brought her back, I just docked her to a rail on my shipyard, not the anchor. I know, bad idea. But I had other projects I was playing with at the time. So from there on I was making tweaks outside the design system. Once done I was going to dock to the anchor and make a blueprint of the final version.
Now the best part...
Thank you for your suggestion. With a little data file trickery I found in another post and your direction to spawn from admin (which got me pointed in the right direction), My ship is back. Thank you again!
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The game does not have "save files" in the sense you are thinking. The data base is constantly over writing itself, so nothing is saved seperatly.
The only way to get the ship back is to put yourself into god mode and go into the sun after it. Or, even better, go into the server.cfg and turn off sun damage since it's really lame in general.
Thanks for the info. I turned off Sun Damage in the server.cfg file. Good thing I did too. When I spawned in the game again, it spawned me at the center of the sun. I must have had that sun as my warp destination, good grief! Guess I would have died again? The only entity that survived was a point defense turret. But I was able to recover the ship with the help of GRHayes suggestion and another post I found on SDM2 files. Many thanks to Timethatswasted and GRHayes for their ship saving advice.