Re: Laptop broken, not saved on Origin, do I have to rebuy my Sims 4 packs?

@FairClarity  The data about which packs you own is stored on EA and/or Steam servers.  So when you get a new computer, all you'll need to do is install Steam and the EA App, and your content should be available to download.

Your saves are stored locally on your computer, specifically in Documents > Electronic Arts > The Sims 4 > saves.  If you can't recover this folder, then you're unfortunately out of luck.  You could try to recover the data, or pay someone to do so, but from what people have reported on this forum, the resulting saves are often not usable.  I don't know exactly why this is, but I suspect that the tools used are recovering most of the saves' data but not all of it, leaving saves that might seem to be intact but which the game can't properly load.

The point is, don't spend money only for the sake of trying to recover your saves.  If you're doing it anyway for other reasons, or you have a free tool (or a friend who fixes computers) you can use instead, then there's no harm in trying.

The other possibility is that your saves might have been uploaded to OneDrive.  You can check by signing into onedrive.com with your Microsoft account.  This would obviously not be relevant if you've never used the service, but it is enabled in Windows 10 and 11 by default, so you might get lucky.