Re: Help! I deleted my Sims 4 household!

@BlkYenOfVeng Yes, if you have not made a backup locally that's more recent than the saves included in the undeleted game saves I assume from what you say that the recent game saves are gone. Please check, as @JonaO703 mentioned, in your library, though, as you may have a copy of the household saved into your library from when you created them (and even a played version of the household can be pulled up if you ever happened to have also saved the household to the library after playing them). This is certainly not the same as being able to have the household at the state you have played them to, but it may be better than nothing. 

For future reference, I would highly recommend beginning to keep local backup copies or your game as mentioned above. So sorry, again, for the loss of the game save. ☹️

What @SheriGR said.  I had a tragic hard drive loss over a decade ago and I'm still paranoid. (I'm still traumatized and will be for life!)

The pro backup rule is if the data is important, you want three copies in two different physical locations.  (You get to decide what's important to you, data-wise.)  Three copies--one of my ex-boyfriends, back in Ye Olden Daze, had a single copy of media to back up his hard drive and his hard drive died mid-backup, so the media had an incomplete backup, aka no backup. *sad trombone*  Your backup location can also fail.  And if they're both in the same building, the building can burn down with your data and the backup in it.  A cloud service counts as a different physical location.

I have a copy of my Sims 4 folder on my NAS, and keep a second copy of just the saves on a thumb drive. You could also use OneDrive/Google Drive/Dropbox/the cloud service of your choice. 

I also do a full image backup of my hard drive nightly.  Since I've started doing that, I've had a hard drive death and I just popped in a new drive and did a restore and it was like nothing ever happened.  I use Acronis; it does your full Windows install and everything and has saved me more than once.

I mean, each person should decide how hard-core they want to be and what level of bitrot they're comfortable with, but just dumping your Sims 4 folder into Dropbox every night might be good enough.

@xochiquetzl_xkvn Absolutely! Thanks for sharing! I have a cautionary tale as well that taught me to backup and backup your backup... I had a backup drive with all my stuff. A big one. One day it fell off the desk. I was in a hurry and put off checking on if it worked until the next day. Guess what happens next day before I check on it? My computer dies. Absolutely, hopelessly dead. Nothing could be retrieved. Now I'm crazed... and I get out my husband's laptop and try to plug the backup drive into it. Nope. Nothing. 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Same thing goes for websites (I design them as my job). I completely deleted my first business website (with the 'help' of a hosting company agent) right after I finished school! And I've had clients who didn't have a backup service on their hosting who lost their entire website to a hacker, virus, or other glitch. If they're very, very lucky the Wayback Machine has a copy. It's such a tragedy and avoidable with minor effort and expense.