Sims 4 Game not saving, help!

@LausCassidy  Do you have OneDrive enabled and set to automatically sync the contents of Documents?  If so, the older saves might be overwriting the new ones.  The easiest intervention is to disable OneDrive, but you can also stop it from auto syncing instead.

If that's not the issue, please create a new save, save your progress, restart your computer, and let me know whether that new save is available to load.

Hi there!

So I do have OneDrive, it's ridiculously annoying! It always starts up whenever I restart my PC, and every time I have to unlink it And I don't know how to stop it!

Do you think if I copy and pasted the files from my one drive over to my PC it would restore what I lost? I can see some save files from the date and time that I saved them on there?

I'm super confused why it's only doing this now?

Thanks for your help so far!

@LausCassidy  It's possible that the content on OneDrive includes the newer versions of your saves; the only way to find out is to open them and look.  First though, disable OneDrive's auto syncing of Documents:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/choose-which-onedrive-folders-to-sync-to-your-computer-98b8b011-8b94-419b-aa95-a14ff2415e85

This will keep OneDrive running, so you can retrieve content from it, but will prevent it from moving your files around on its own.  When you're satisfied, you can uninstall or just disable it if you want.

Move the Sims 4 folder out of OneDrive and onto your desktop and look at the saves and Tray folders inside.  You'll get some idea of what they are from their modified dates, that is if moving the files doesn't reset the dates.  If you want to load the files in-game, go into the Sims 4 folder in Documents\Electronic Arts and move the saves and Tray files to the desktop (not in the same location as the ones from OneDrive; create a new folder if necessary), and move the ones from OneDrive into that Sims 4 folder.  When you load the game, you'll see all the OneDrive content.

If the saves and tray files don't load, it might be because of how they're named.  Saves in particular need to be named in the format Slot_0000000x.save , so if there are extra numbers in there, e.g. Slot_0000000x 2.save, the game won't read them.  You can just remove the extraneous numbers though.

Hi there,

So I'm trying to do as you advised and it keeps saying this...(See picture)

I tried it with Documents too and it said the same thing.

Any ideas to get around that?

Edit: I have included a screenshot of my save files too, there seems like there's quite a lot, is there any I should be deleting?

The save I'm trying to get back is the 17th Jan one from 3am.

Thank you!

@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.