"mommarhonda;15164008" wrote:
For a little over a year, I've been having a continous problem with my saved sims games just disappearing. I'll be playing a family and then one day I'll log back on and they'll be gone and a family I played months ago will reappear in their place. Any custom content or sims I've saved to the bin since then will be gone, too. But then a few weeks later the same family will pop back up, replacing the other family. It's just became this continuous cycle and I have no idea on how to fix it. (the sims don't seem to always be in the backups folder, either). Luckily, none of my paid expansion packs seem to go missing and still work fine.
I've gotten used to it, but now its starting to bug me. I recently figured out how to download mods, which are amazing (as long as they work correctly), however, after playing with them for a few days the same thing happened, and my mods don't work in game anymore. They're still in tact in the mods folder, everythings in place where it should be, but they're just not working anymore and my old family is gone. I've tried deleting and reinstalling a few of the mods, but that doesn't seem to work, either. At this point, I'm just waiting for my current game to disappear so my old family will come back as well as the mods. I don't know what to do anymore and this is starting to really frustrate me.
Hi there. I think I see what's happening here. We all have what we call a Game Folder in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 3 (or some path like that) that contains our installed content, worlds, saved sims, Library files, mods, and saved games. It sounds to me like somehow you ended up with two different Game Folders on your system and sometimes one of them is loading up with one set of each of those things while at other times the second one with a different set of everything is loading instead. Expansion Packs aren't a part of this structure, they are installed in Program Files or Program Files (x86) and will persist no matter which Game Folder is being loaded up.
If you have Win 10 (or even 8.1, I think), the game loves to try to put its Game Folder in OneDrive if you have that activated, but it really doesn't belong in there. But the second one could be hiding in other locations. We've even heard of second unwanted Game Folders appearing in the Documents folder of a different user on the same computer. You may have to do searches for it if it's not obvious.
