Re: MISSING GALLERY ITEMS

@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.

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

@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.