When we were going through different versions of the game I save some families between the version .02 and .03. Later I deleted those families from my game. Then one day (much more than just a few weeks later)I found the folder where I'd saved their files and thought I'd see if they were still alive since I didn't know back then to pause them before saving. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were all still alive...even though some were sick. They didn't have much groceries left, and the houses were nasty but all were alive.

The same thing happened to me.

I was 2 or 3 generations ahead of a backup file I found on a pendrive. I decided to see how things were, just for the fun of it, and to my suprise they were all alive - some were a bit sick (not gravely ill though) and the house was dirty - but that was all.