When and how does this game save, I finished the quest to get the guys water pump working, he gave me a rucksack to increase my inventory space, I exit the game via the the main menu. Next time I boot up the game I no longer have the extra space and have not even completed the water pump quest.

So when and how does this game save ?

Sounds like an issue with either cloud saving (game loads older version) or disabled rights for overwriting files in savegame directory.

You still have the extra space it is just implemented extremely piss poor...Just like 3/4 of this game

Cloud saving, I see no option to turn this ON/OFF, I thought that was only with the cloud version.

It seems the problem was down to a possible corrupt save file, I could not even delete the character from
within game, I had to go into Documents/My Games/ Grim Dawn etc to delete it.

Since doing that and restarting so far all seems good.