It sounds like the playerfiles themselves really are literally individual files? It'd be good to store all of that info into the DB, then you can rollback, when a save fails. In that case you at least keep the files clean, and you will only lose info until the last successfull save.

That's ofcourse assuming it's possible within the means that you have.

Purely out of curiousity, what programming language is actually used on CF? I hope at least C++, not just C? Yes, I'm a coder myself