Forum Discussion

jjki26787678776's avatar
jjki26787678776
2 years ago
Solved

Save files lost-recovery methods not working

Hi, I have recently fully reset my PC, and after re-installing Sims 4, I noticed my game had lost progress. All saves associated with my most recent household played in the past couple of weeks befor...
pc
  • puzzlezaddict's avatar
    puzzlezaddict
    2 years ago

    @jjki267876787765  Well that does mean you've found the right folder and the game is reading it.  I can't say for sure, but I would guess the problem had something to do with your unusual Documents location.  Since this could cause (more) issues going forward, I'd suggest you force Documents back to the default location of Users > your username > Documents, as described here:

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/operation-to-change-a-personal-folder-location-fails-in-windows-ffb95139-6dbb-821d-27ec-62c9aaccd720

    Once you've done that, you can move the Electronic Arts folder from its current location into Documents, and at least OneDrive won't be able to interfere going forward.  I'd also suggest trying to recover any saves from 2024 that don't end in .save already; hopefully you'll be able to find at least some of your missing saves.

    I would guess that OneDrive replaced newer files with older ones of the same name, rather than the other way around as it should have.  Your save files have such low numbers that you must have had others with those same names at some point, and I guess that point was in 2022.  The unfortunate part is that if there aren't any other 2024 saves in OneDrive's recycle bin, there's nowhere else to look, because the newer files were simply overwritten.

puzzlezaddict's avatar
puzzlezaddict
Hero+
2 years ago

@jjki267876787765  Well that does mean you've found the right folder and the game is reading it.  I can't say for sure, but I would guess the problem had something to do with your unusual Documents location.  Since this could cause (more) issues going forward, I'd suggest you force Documents back to the default location of Users > your username > Documents, as described here:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/operation-to-change-a-personal-folder-location-fails-in-windows-ffb95139-6dbb-821d-27ec-62c9aaccd720

Once you've done that, you can move the Electronic Arts folder from its current location into Documents, and at least OneDrive won't be able to interfere going forward.  I'd also suggest trying to recover any saves from 2024 that don't end in .save already; hopefully you'll be able to find at least some of your missing saves.

I would guess that OneDrive replaced newer files with older ones of the same name, rather than the other way around as it should have.  Your save files have such low numbers that you must have had others with those same names at some point, and I guess that point was in 2022.  The unfortunate part is that if there aren't any other 2024 saves in OneDrive's recycle bin, there's nowhere else to look, because the newer files were simply overwritten.

jjki26787678776's avatar
jjki26787678776
2 years ago

While OneDrive is still active and has synced as normal, I have moved the Documents folder to the right place. I also noticed that the Desktop folder was in an odd place and put it back in the default location using the same method. Oddly enough the Documents folder is available by clicking through the normal path to my username folder and its files, but if I pin my username folder to Quick Access, and click on the Quick Access pinned username folder, the Documents folder does not show up as an icon within this pinned folder (yet shows up normally if I just pin the Documents folder itself or access through all other normal ways), but this isn't really an issue as it's more convenient to access Documents as normal anyway. 

I have tried to recover 2024 saves that didn't end in '.save' (all of them did end in a variant of '.ver' followed by a number) but I don't think it was successful as I didn't find any new saves within my files after doing so, I think that might be because they didn't have anything to do with my lost save files anyway/were the same as the saves I currently have. Hopefully the corrected file path of the Documents folder prevents this from recurring. Thanks

About The Sims 4 Technical Issues - PC

PC players get help with their technical issues in The Sims 4 here.52,393 PostsLatest Activity: 15 minutes ago