I agree with the others. Try installing the mods you had back again, and going into your old save and see if that works. It crashing on an old save when it absolutely should load one just fine, tells me the game is trying to load something that WAS in the game world, but no longer is, and there's nothing new telling the game how to handle it. So it's nothing from a previous update being deleted, that I promise. That's why I say you must have had a mod running on your old save. And trust me, I know, after beating the game once, it's really, REALLY rough to go through the entire early game again, having to be very strategic with all your points so you don't end up starving or having to fix a different transformer/half a dozen servers a day. I'd much rather sink my points into lvl3 drives, transformer stability, and a Kerfur if possible by the middle of week 2 or end of it at least. Thankfully, the games story takes place over the course of 7 weeks, well almost, just shy of a day so might as well round up. But not being able to bring over things like cameras, spare food, a hook, light sources, etc, can really make one turn to Cheat Engine to just give one the points to have a soft start rather than a brand new one. What I did was meet my self in the middle. I wanted to bring a lot of stuff over from the old one, but wanted a good fresh start as well. So I gave myself enough points to max the transformers out, up my detector quality to 6, ping cooldown to 6 as well, and sensor speed to 4, and threw the rest of the spare points into food/Breaker_Components_Time since A: Food is always a nice comodity to have in the early game, especially variety, but I didn't go for expensive stuff, just bread, take out boxes, and a few tolberones or something I think. Again, it was a cheap order. And B, being able to change the breakers from the PC is an awesome new addition, and really, it doesn't affect gameplay THAT MUCH besides saving time and stamina and being able to min/max your energy savings. So that gave me a nice soft start to go with, and now that you start off with a free item box and some trash bags and a facility full of garbage, you can make some decent money before your first official day.
Hopefully I didn't ramble on too much, but I hope maybe my idea of having a "soft start" as opposed to out right cheating feels like a better way of going about starting all over again :P