in-game save file changed by save state

[FocusPotato]

I'm currently playing through Earthbound. I use a combination of save states and in-game saves, favouring the in-game save where possible

Yesterday I was randomly jumping through my collection of old save states to see different parts of my journey, then I closed snes9x and went to bed.
This morning when I booted up the game, the in-game save had reverted to a much older but still in-game save. I didn't realise this could happen, I assumed the game's .srm file was overwritten at in-game checkpoints and was unaffected by save states.

I lost a ton of progress, since I was predominantly using the in-game saves and my last save state was a while ago. I'm not expecting a way to recover the in-game save, since it seems like the .srm gets overwritten, but I thought I'd post this in case there is a solution, or perhaps as a warning to others. Has anyone else had this problem? This is my first time using an emulator.

[odditude]

unfortunately, save states do indeed contain SRAM - this is necessary because some games use a portion of SRAM as work RAM, and not including it leads to bugs in those games. you'd need to take a save state prior to loading a previous one if you intend to return to a later one.

mixing battery saves and savestates can lead to painful mistakes; my recommendation there is to use battery saves as "proper" saves, and only use savestates at the end of play sessions as a separate CYA action.