Friday I came back to playing Forza 5 after a couple month break to check out the new Long Beach track. All was fine, and I was working on the drift achievement. The following morning I came back to play more and it immediately went to the new game intro. I thought it was just a glitch and continued to get through the intro sequences. I then noticed that my game had been completely lost. I was over level 450, and had at least a hundred cars, multiple tunes for my favorite cars, and custom paint designs. I tried deleting the game and completely reinstall it to no luck. Now I’m level 1 again and lost several hundred hours of work. The only lucky part to this is that I had just gotten the 8th level 25 affinity achievement. I didn’t mind as much losing the level, or losing cars. What is depressing are all of the saved tunes and paint jobs I had done to go whoosh into a black hole in the cloud. I’m assuming there is no recovery as I’ve researched the interwebs for any solution. I’ve noticed several recent similar posts. Does anyone know if there is anything that can be done?
Welcome to the wonderful world of Forza.
this.
I’m really sorry to hear this, happened to me too (and many many others). Microsoft/Turn 10 really owes us one. We deserve our money back
I’ve never had that problem before. Ever since Forza 3 had that problem & Turn10 said “to back up to screen where you hit A Button to start game”, it’s a habit of mine now. Fortunately, I’ve never ever had that happen to me.
Ate you people backing up to start screen before exiting game?
Absolutely. I make my living developing tests for the cloud applications my company builds. I have come to the conclusion that only a fool trusts the "cloud’ to save and protect anything.
We need a damn option to save our game saves locally as backups like the 360 had.
Just rather pathetic that Microsoft wont man up and say its a problem, nor does turn 10. This is absurd.
I don’t even start up forza 5 anymore due to being scared my profile will vanish. So instead just been finishing up 2, 3, and 4 event list races I missed to get my rewards level up, which I have no idea why cause If my profile disappears so does my 9 million free credits I have saved from monthly rewards, and my limited edition stuff too…
Start an XBox Ambassador chat. Then escalate as needed to an XBox Tech Support call. Who knows, maybe an Xbox support tech could find your cloud-save cache intact and restore from there. (Not likely, since the uninstall & new install may have overwritten findable remnants.)
These systems are backed up. Getting one user’s data recovered may be hard to do, but I’d like to hear the response when requested, and I’d like them to get a request EVERY TIME a player wants their lost files recovered.
There are 5 million XBox Ones out there. That’s a huge number of save files, and equates to a very large number of recovery requests. Except it’s not easy to make the requests, so there’s less visibility to XBox admins, so there’s less impetus for XBox management to build and streamline a user-level restore capability.
A similair thing happened to me last night, had to triple line quit the game because it wouldnt load a track, go to open the game again and it said that i need to choose a different storage device as the current one (the cloud) was full. The cloud ate my cars, my affinities and my drivatar stats. It spared my in game CR and my driver level. As of now I’m talking to a useless ambassador. hoping for the best.
If anyone has had this issue happen to them can you drop me a private message please with the title “save game issues”
The same happened to me. Level, garage, progress and affinity ALL lost. But once I started a new save, my designs and tunes where still there. I assume you have already checked, but if not I recommend checking and not just assuming it all went down the drain alongside your levels and such! 
Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree, but does the Xbox console not have a local backup? Reason I ask is several times over the last week I’ve frozen on a game (for various reasons - nothing suspect) and once I reload up my console I’m presented with the option to use the local save file or the cloud save file (which is usually newer/ more up to date).
This leads me to believe that there is a local back up somewhere on the console that might be findable?