Thought I might update this as Elite now works with DFR.

Saved games will not appear when [C]atalogued but you can still [L]oad your saved game. It just wont show in Elite.

Elite's savegames have a protection, see Ian Bell's site for more info.

Yeah, I seem to recall it had something to do with time stamping the file.

The ELFIX file works meaning you can load saved games but they just won't show when you catalogue the disk. Managed to play a save position I had saved on 5.25" from my PC-1640. Must be 25+ years old.

As mentioned above, it's the archive attribute. The game clears the attribute from save files and refuses to load files with it set. This 'copy protection' works because editing the save file in a hex editor or other program will reset the archive attribute. The files themselves are unencrypted and easy to modify. (You can give yourself 1677721.5 credits and all the hardware, including the anti-ECM system.)

I thought the protection was more than a read only , hidden , archive and or system attribute. Like a checksum or something.

Maybe in Elite Plus, but the data files of the original Elite are completely unprotected, apart from this attribute thing.

You're right, i was referring to Elite Plus.