Re: Sims 4 Game not saving, help!

@LausCassidy  For OneDrive, try the approaches mentioned here; you may need to stop a sync in progress before you can change the settings:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-to-cancel-or-stop-sync-in-onedrive-4885c27e-3d89-4d69-be75-2646c71367d3

If those steps don't help, try this approach:

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/116029-turn-off-onedrive-pc-folder-backup-protection-windows-10-a.html#option2

For the saves themselves, all the junk after the .save part of a save name needs to be deleted before the game will read it.  The .verx suffix means a backup save; the -DESKTOP... is what OneDrive put on the end of duplicates so it could sync those duplicates in addition to the originals without having multiple files with the same name.  Point is, for the saves you want, make sure to delete the extra characters in the save name, then put the files in the local version of ...\The Sims 4\saves, and the game should read them.

OneDrive is always going to be annoying though, unless you make it stop.

Hi there,

Sorry for the delay, I was having a mess around with it all and I think I managed to get my original save game back by deleting a tonne.

Now OneDrive actually restored some and I'm unsure what ones I should be deleting now. This may be completely random, and I understand if you can't, but would you be able to highlight the files in the attached screenshot that I should be deleting?

I cannot stress enough that I'm a complete novice at this and I'm concerned about what happens with my game, even with my backup saves on my desktop, One Drive is causing everything to take forever. 

I think I'm just going to have to accept OneDrive running in the background, because when I do, it does seem to let everything run smoothly. But yeah, would really appreciate if you could help with this screenshot! I'm sorry for being a hassle!

The green highlighted one is the save I need to keep. 🙂

Thank you so much! 🙂

@LausCassidy  You can in theory delete everything else in the screenshot except for the highlighted one and Slot_00000003.save, third from the bottom.  However, in your position, I'd keep the saves that end in .verx, right below the save you highlighted and the one I listed, because those are the game's automatic backups.  It's always good to have those around in case you need them at some point.

All the files that have the word DESKTOP in them are duplicates created by OneDrive when it synced your files at various points.  They can all go.  I still think that OneDrive is going to do more harm than good in the long run, so you'd be better off finding a way to at least disable its auto sync function.  But it's up to you.

One way to mitigate the risk is to periodically back up your save files, not the duplicates but the ones that end in .save or .save.verx, to an external hard drive or USB stick.  That way, even if everything on your computer disappears, you won't have to start from scratch.

Hi there,

Okay thank you so much!

Honestly I do forsee OneDrive causing more issues, it's only caused issues since I first got this PC a few weeks ago.

Every time I turn on my PC I 'unlink' this PC, it always ends up 're-linking' when I turn my PC back on, It's like I can't quite get rid of it no matter what I try?

I've tried all the links you provided and nothing ☹️

Thank you for the back up advice! I have an external hard drive, so I'll do this 🙂

@LausCassidy  You can try telling OneDrive not to start with Windows.  Open the Task Manager (you need to be in detailed mode), click the Startup tab, and uncheck the box next to OneDrive.

If nothing else works, you could also create a new Windows user account on your computer and not opt into OneDrive.  If you make it a local account, as in, you don't sign into Microsoft, there should be no linking and no way for OneDrive to interfere.  I don't know how much user data you currently have, other than your Sims content, but it's easy enough to move over the files you want to keep.