So I was zipping up a savegame to post here, and after I tried to start Stonehearth, the game took forever to start, and once it got to the “Load saved game” menu, it completely froze. I removed the zipped savegame from the saved_games folder, and everything was back to normal. Figured I’d throw it here in case if anyone’s currently wondering why their SH mysteriously stopped working. 
Screenshot of example: http://puu.sh/g08Bq/e2667d4c29.png
I’m not sure I follow you. There’s several sub-directories in the saved_games folder and several files in each of those directories. Did you just zip one file or a directory of files? Where did you put this zip file?
Updated my post to answer your question. I made a .zip of the saved game folder inside saved_games, and left it there, as per screenshot. Starting Stonehearth afterwards caused problems.
I don’t recommend leaving zip folders around there. Just as there are priorities of which mods get loaded (uncompressed folders or .smods), having more folders with the same name could cause issues. This might not necessarily be true, but… I’d say to keep the backup saves in another folder outside the game just in case 
