So the ps3 and ps4 would delete your stuff after an outage?

No, never happened to me, and I usually skip the "tut tut, need to check the entire hdd" screen on ps3 as it takes forever on a 320GB model. Seems to work fine still. (It's usually caused by having to do a hard rest after the browser locks up on something)

I've unplugged my ps4 a few times too in rest mode without problems but have disabled rest mode now. I don't want it to download stuff automatically anyway with my bandwidth cap. Outages still happen plenty in my town, any severe thunder storm and the power cycles at least once. Spring and fall are usually accompanied by frequently 12:00 12:00 12:00 flashing clocks all over the house.

But I guess, if you're unlucky enough to lose power right in the middle of a write action, stuff could get corrupted. Weird that the ps4 would wipe all save games though. Must have been really unlucky it lost power while updating the fat table. Still that should have redundancies, very odd.

Nah. It never deleted anything. That system check would always make me nervous, though. 

Nah. M$ backs up everything for everybody. It may be because they're just nice.... Or maybe because they're stockpiling information on everybody! You log out of one Xbox and log into another. Your save data goes with you. 

One great thing about the PS4 is that it can go from totally powered off to playing a game several times faster than an Xbox One. With Xbox you kinda have to keep it in sleep mode or risk turning it on and waiting for a half hour update. PS4, not so much unless you're downloading a game or expecting an update.

Weird, I've never once accidentally picked sleep mode. "Shut down system" is the second option under power settings for me in the quick menu, turning it all off seemed super simple and painless to me haha. 

Slightly off topic but I see on the occasion some people say that PSN has slow downloads for them, I personally am of the opinion that that's due to a poorly or completely unconfigured network; do you think that it might be worth creating a thread discussing various network settings and how to maximize your connection? Major gains are to be had with a few adjustments I think.

But where is the connection between downloading/installing an update and the save files for every single game on that console?
And why are the games still installed then?

I have my X1 set to instant-on and unplug it every night before going to bed to save some power (unless there's a huge patch for a game I want to play the next morning). I even unplug it during downloading game updates and it will just resume the next time I plug it in again.

It is thinking.

Its  probably for a similar reason as to why you're supposed to "safely remove hardware" every time you unplug an external drive from a computer. It's not that it will corrupt your save data, it's that it *could* corrupt your save data. Sony warns against this every time you go into sleep mode. As for Xbox, it was designed as an always on always online console. I would imagine Microsoft had to take extra steps to ensure this doesn't happen (or maybe it can? Idk, not a software/hardware engineer)

Xbox One sounds like typical Windows to me, lol. I guess I'm just a little surprised that Sony would make you pay for the backup feature when everyone else wants to force it on you whether you like it or not.

I'll just have to make a note to backup my saves to a flash drive when I do eventually get a PS4.

turn off the PS4 correctly. power down completely, wait for lights to come off, and then you unplug.