[PLEASE READ] Sims 4 deleted some of my saves.

Question

hii!! so yesterday I moved my Mods folder to an external hard drive with a symbolic link, y'know, the usual. at first I had accidentally moved all my Sims documents (mods, cache, saves, etc etc) to my external hard drive so the symbolic link didn't work and I moved all of them back. anyways, I finally moved just the mods, got the link to work, and booted up a game of the sims. I had no saves and it looked exactly how it does open opening the game for the first time. I closed it and went back to my files and found my saves in my app data, even though the mods and such were in the "public" user app data. anyways, I moved them to the correct save location and booted up the game again. I had my saves, but not my most recent 2 or 3.

I never deleted ANY of my saves when moving stuff and when I accidentally moved all the sims documents to my D: drive I moved it back to my C: drive where it was to begin with without skipping any files except a few mods ones because I didn't have storage for those (I kept them in an extra folder in my D: drive while I moved the right things and when I got the mods to my D: drive properly I put them back in the D: drive's mod folder)

i've cleared my recycle bin since before booting up the game and I didn't see anything that looked like a save file (yk how they say like save_00089 or so? yeah, none of those.) and have gone through my recycle bin again afterwards to check and once again nothing was there.

i've searched for "save" in my files and only saw the correct save folder that I know only contained the few saves I had left and a scratch folder which had nothing in it anyhow. where are my saves???? I want to get them back so bad I worked so hard. please help

puzzlezaddict · Answer

argburdotnet​&nbsp; Do you see the save files with the correct time stamps?&nbsp; If you do, please post a screenshot of the saves folder with the nonworking saves highlighted.&nbsp; You can hold down ctrl while clicking to highlight multiple files that aren't next to each other.
It's also worth searching your computer again, this time clicking This PC in the File Explorer window so you're searching the entire PC, AND searching for&nbsp;Slot_ rather than&nbsp;save, to find any saves that might have been renamed.

argburdotnet · Answer

i searched This PC for slot_ and moved every file there (selected all of them) to my saves folder. it said there was a few files with the same name and i said "replace these files" and then booted up ts4 again, but i still have no "new" saves (the ones that were gone). also there's no saves modified on may 7th or 8th which is the last time i used the save i'm looking for

puzzlezaddict · Answer

argburdotnet​&nbsp; Please post a screenshot of the contents of the saves folder.
Also, I really hope you didn't replace your newer saves with older ones.&nbsp; Rather than "replace," it's best to "skip this file" and rename it so you don't delete anything that might be important.

argburdotnet · Answer

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puzzlezaddict · Answer

argburdotnet​&nbsp; I think I see why some saves aren't loading: you only have backup versions, not the current saves.&nbsp; Sort the folder's contents by name to put them in numerical order.&nbsp; You'll notice that all numbers have multiple versions that end in .verx, which are the game's automatic backups; but only some numbers have a version that ends in .save.&nbsp; For example, there's a Slot_00000005.save, but I don't think there's a&nbsp;Slot_00000002.save, at least I'm not seeing it.
For any number that only has backups, strip the&nbsp;.verx extension off of one of the backups to make it into a viable save.&nbsp; The&nbsp;.ver0 file is the newest, so try that first.&nbsp; If you can't load that, put the .ver0 extension back on and try the&nbsp;.ver1 file, and so on.