My SIms 4 save files keep disappearing
I have been playing this game for 4 years now. I got a new computer around the beginning of June and everything went fine. I did run into trouble where on one account the sims 4 wouldn't launch entir...
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Ok, so my onedrive is not synced, I made sure that wouldn't do anything before downloading the game. I don't have the legacy edition so that can't be it. And I've fixed the deletion issue, EA knows the sims 4 deletes saves because on that other thread people had that exact issue and EA could stop the future files from being deleted but not recover the old ones. I can play the game fine now, but someone who works for EA should fix this because this is a reoccurring problem from 6 YEARS ago. @puzzlezaddict I know you don't work for EA so I don't know if you can help from here, but thanks for your concern.
@bridgerex26 I honestly don't know why the files would disappear on you. I've seen many threads about saves disappearing, but among the people who come back, almost all of them find their files in cloud storage (OneDrive or iCloud) or elsewhere on their computers. I've never had this issue myself, so it's difficult to track what triggers it; I don't even know where these files are landing half the time, because people just say "I found them" and leave it at that.
I would love to know what fixed the issue for you in particular, both out of curiosity and in case I see it again. Given that this is a recurring problem, you'll probably want to back up your files periodically, just in case. Of course you shouldn't have to, but it's best practice anyway, and besides, there are enough other reasons saves disappear or get corrupted that aren't EA's fault, anything from an extremely broken mod to hard drive failure.
@Simslovergirl114 Are you missing several households within existing saves, or several saves of one household each? Are the lots missing from your in-game library, or from within the saves?
I'm missing several households within, the lots are missing in the saves, they're in the gallery but I don't want to take them from there and put them back on the empty lots, I also have a household that I'm doing a let's play with but the house that I used was in Del Sol Valley but I redesigned it and now the redesigned house is gone and no where in my library or gallery
@Simslovergirl114 Are your saves otherwise intact, as in, are they mostly up to date with the progress from the last time you played them? The question is whether you're looking at older versions of those saves, from before the new households and lots were placed; or saves that are recent but that have disappearing content, for some reason.
For the first possibility, open a File Explorer window and search for Slot_* (with the asterisk), which should turn up any save files on your hard drive. If you find saves that have recent dates and are possibly not being read by the game, click on one of them, select Open File Location (above the list of files), and let me know the full file path to that particular save.
If your saves are up to date but households or builds have disappeared from them, try loading a backup save. Use the manual method here:
https://sims4.crinrict.com/eng/2014/09/save-games/#wiederherstellen
And make copies of the saves and the backups, in case you need them later.
The saves are up to date but the most recent households that I made are not showing up and thank you for the help
@puzzlezaddict I fixed the issue thanks to the people in the thread I linked. But I can't recover the saves, the first place I checked was on my onedrive but there's nothing there, I've searched the computer which is how I found them once before but the saves aren't anywhere on it. Again I'm just upset because this issue dates back to the game's release and I'm posting on here mainly because I want EA to fix the issue so this doesn't happen to future players. I do backup my saves which is why I found this odd because all traces of the saves are gone and I've backed them up to numerous locations. I don't have mods, so they didn't cause anything, and this computer is brand new so hard drive failure shouldn't be an issue either.
@bridgerex26 There's no way that Sims 4 would delete your saves stored in other locations. I can see how it might manage to delete saves stored in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4\saves, and it does have permission to write to the Electronic Arts folder, but there's no reason the game would even be able to find all the duplicates not in the Documents directory.
Do you have a cleaner app or something similar installed on your PC? Many of these apps will, among other things, scan for duplicate files and remove all but one copy. This can be manual or automatic, so you might not even know it happened until you went to look for your backups.
For what it's worth, posting in this particular forum isn't likely to get the attention of anyone working on Sims 4. This forum is mostly players helping players, with the occasional EA community manager popping in, but they're forum organizers, not Maxis developers. While major issues do get forwarded, most threads never get seen.
If you do want the devs to take notice, then to be honest, you'll need more than just "my saves keep disappearing and I've ruled out the usual issues." I don't know what's happening on your particular computer, of course, but like I mentioned before, most people with this issue find it's caused by OneDrive or their systems moving files around, clearly nothing done by the game itself. True, many posters never come back, but other than the issues copying files to the Legacy Edition folder, I don't think there are any recent examples where it's been demonstrated that the game itself is outright deleting files. So people are going to assume that's not happening until proven otherwise.
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