MISSING GALLERY ITEMS
I changed from Origin to the EA app when prompted to. Since then all my gallery items have disappeared. This includes all items/households I made and also those I downloaded from others. Does anyo...
Forum Discussion
Hi
I followed your instructions.
First I copied the first five files from 7/03/23 and pasted them into the tray folder.
You were right - I had just one item show up in the gallery with that experiment. One household.
Next I tried pasting the other files you suggested, just to see what happened, but again only had only one item show up in the gallery . This time it was a different household.
Does this shed any light on the problem?
I really appreciate you taking the time to help work this out. Even if the end result means I never get my items back - I will still be very grateful for the time spent helping me. I'm learning a lot myself.
@Foxley828 For these households that showed up, let me make sure: were they loading before or not? I thought not based on the timeline you posted, but if they were working, please try a set of files, all with the same timestamp, from before you transitioned to the App and from the time period where you can no longer see your files.
There are two distinct possibilities here. One is that you simply have too many files in Tray, and the fix there is to be selective in what you load. As you've seen, you can swap these files back and forth as you wish, so you could set up different Tray folders with different sets of content. It might take some time to organize everything, but once it's done, moving the folders around is simple.
The other possibility is that some of the Tray items are corrupt. With the second set of files you tested, the list of files suggests that there were several different saved items, but all at the same time, so I'm wondering whether you pressed the Save button over and over, or the game reacted as if you had. If it's really just the one household, I can help you get rid of the duplicate files. But it's also possible that some of the files don't work at all, like there should be several copies of this household showing, but most do not because the files can't be read. And if that's the case for other Tray items, ones where intact duplicates don't exist, there's no way to save them.
Point is, please test some older files that you know weren't showing up when you reported this, and let me know how it goes.
- @puzzlezaddict Hi and thank you. I will do this now - not sure if I have any files from before 7/3/2023 only the one from December 2020 but i'll try that one and see what happens. Off to investigate. Let you know the outcome.
Hi
The only file in the original tray from before I swapped to the EA app was one from 19th December 2020.
I cleared the tray - fired up game and made a clean empty tray then pasted the file into the tray.
When I launched game there were no items in my personal gallery library at all. So I guess they are all gone?
I've accepted that my items are probably gone but what's concerning me most is why? What happened and how did they all get deleted?
It's left me very worried that this could happen again. There were years and hours of time put into that library and now it's all just gone?'
The only files in my tray are the one from 19th December 2020 - 1 file which is when I stopped playing for a while as I was forced to take a break.
Then the files start again from when I swapped to the EA app - there are no other files or dates in the tray bar 19th December 2020 and 7/03/2023 upwards.
What function does the tray have just out of interest?
@Foxley828 I don't know where your other files could have gone, to be honest. The most likely place is OneDrive, if it's running at all—even when people don't intend to use it, OneDrive can still be active. But that's no help for people who don't use it or who might have overwritten the older files with newer ones.
The way to prevent this is to make backup copies and store them elsewhere, i.e. not on your computer. An external drive works, and if you don't have one, you can set up a free account on one of the filehosting sites (e.g. Dropbox) and upload some content there. The free accounts don't offer enough storage to back up everything, but your most recent saves and Tray items should fit, especially if you zip the folders before uploading them. On the other hand, external drives are very large and very cheap.
The Tray folder holds the data for the files that show up in-game in your library. When you save something to your library, several files are generated, with the file types and number depending on what kind of item it is. That's why I suggested you move one set of files with the same timestamp: that should correspond to one saved file. If you're curious exactly what these files are, please see this:
https://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/forum/index.php?topic=26535.0
- @puzzlezaddict Hi
First off thank you again for all the time and trouble you have taken to talk me through this. It's been very enlightening and although I now know I'll never get my files back - at least I've learned a lot so thank you for that.
I have no idea what happened.
I never knew the tray existed until you asked me to look in it so I've not accidentally deleted these files.
All I know is on 19th December which is the last time I played before swapping to the EA app all my personal library was there and in tact. Then when I swapped it was all gone. I guess we will never know the answer to that.
Just out of curiosity is there a way I could find out if they are on one drive? As I said I dont use it but I do use microsoft word and it asks me if I want to save things to one drive and has on occasion saved a document there which I didn't ask it to do so obviously it's running somewhere.
I don't wish to take up more time than you are willing to give you've already been more than generous with that but I'm still hoping somewhere - these files still exist.
Thank you for everything anyway. @Foxley828 There are a few different ways to access OneDrive, but the easiest one to try that wouldn't involve possibly messing with your OS settings is to sign into onedrive.com with your Microsoft account name. You should be able to access all your uploaded files from there. I wouldn't count on any files showing up in cloud storage though.
If you have more questions, please feel free to keep asking. I like answering posts here, and I'll get back to you when I can.
- @puzzlezaddict Thank you - you've been very helpful and I've learned a lot. Especially to back up my folders! As I never use one drive and I don't want to really I'll leave that for now and just accept I've lost my gallery. I'm busy building another one and hope this one doesn't go for a walk!
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