The graveyard.sav glitch that has been hitting so many players has turned out to be a "viral" infection of sorts that is passed across players, originating with the modding community. It may have been accidental, it may have been intentional, who knows. I'd rather not debate that here, I would like to keep this informative.
What is graveyard.sav? What does this have to do with me?
When you get hit by the glitch that turns your save into graveyard.sav, upon entering FFYL and then subsequently dying for whatever reason, you will never respawn. You die and go into a free roam camera. If you try to load another character, dashboard, restart your xbox, etc, your save data is completely gone and there is no hope of recovering it at that point, as it is renamed graveyard.sav and is missing the majority of the data it once had.
What?! How did I get this?
As stated above, the glitch originated with the modding community and may or may not have been accidental. It spread from there, and it passes from the infected player to all other players in the game with said infected player. At this point, it's a terrible chain, and chances are it passed to you through some randoms.
But I don't play with randoms! I play with my friends only
Do your friends play with randoms? Have any of you ever had somebody come into a game and trade you anything? It's easy to spread, unfortunately.
How can I get my character back?
Once your save file has turned into graveyard.sav, you cannot get your character back. Too much data has been lost at that point, and it is far beyond salvageable.
So how can I prevent this, or save my character if it gets effected later?
If you want to prevent this, you have to make sure you're not playing with randoms, and that everybody you play with isn't playing with randoms, AND that it isn't currently effecting anybody in your group. Along with that, MAKE FREQUENT BACKUPS, and if you are on 360, do not backup to the Cloud, as it will sync with your HD saves and your backups will be overwritten, apparently. Memory card or USB drive is best.