I’m quite sure that after powering up you need to run mac join abp, to use the OTAA Join Accept settings that were saved by mac save? That’s at least how I’ve been doing it.
Still then, you’ll run into frame counter problems if you do not also issue mac save after each and every uplink. See @kersing’s thoughts on EEPROM wear above!
And probably not relevant for 1.0.4, but: