Comment by catalogia

> it also makes the saving process itself more fragile (since the longer a save takes, the more likely it becomes that the process might be killed by some natural event like a power cut during it†.)

This is one I take very seriously, after I got bit by it. I was saving state by writing s-expressions to a text file; it seemed a reasonable enough thing to do even with tens of megabytes of it, until my laptop turned off in the middle of a write. After recovering from a backup and losing several hours of work in the process, I switched to SQLite that evening.