Sims 4 Save File Missing

[saminicolesc]

Hi!

So, I played the Sims 4 quite a bit during the summer last year, and I stopped around August to focus on school. I had done a lot during the summer, including start lots of new households and some intricate builds I was really proud of! So, come today, I decide to play Sims again since I have a bit of time. Imagine my shock when I see none of my saves or save files for the game I was playing are there.

There are two saves that show up in game, one for a random newbie tutorial I started just for fun, and a second one that only has one throwaway character. They're both listed as being modified in June, so I'm missing all saves or files from the work I did between June and August. 

I looked in my save file to see if there was anything missing, but these save files are only copies of the tutorial and throwaway games. I've tried changing the names of the files slightly to see if it would do anything, but again, the files say they haven't been touched since June. I definitely played for hours upon hours after June, but that game is nowhere to be found. 

I had One Drive unsynched for a while, but I synched it again tonight in an attempt to see if my save files ended up on the cloud and the game couldn't read it, but there are no save files for anything after June on there either. 

I've also searched my PC for any files with the word slot or save or Sims 4 from last year, and the only things that pop up, are again, only from June. It's as if all the gameplay I did from June to August just disappeared. I'd really appreciate some help!

I took a picture of what I'm seeing in my save files. 

[crinrict · Accepted solution]

@saminicolesc Are you sure those saves have been saved locally before ? Did they exist on your local drive or just in the game ? Like did you check the file system if they were present ?

Did you just turn off syncing or the usage of oneDrive entirely ?

I'm thinking more the game used the files on oneDrive and not the local ones. So basically those august files were on oneDrive only (not locally). There's no syncing needed for the game to use the files on one Drive as far as I'm aware.

When you then sync the drives, you've overwritten the oneDrive files with your local ones instead of the other way round.

The game does seem to like to switch between oneDrive and the local drive on patches so I'm guessing this is the scenario what happened:

1. The game used the local drive up to June, creating those files.
2. In July/August, the game used oneDrive to save the progress
3. When you now played again, it switched back to local, showing you only the June ones. Playing around then created those new files from 2021
4. At this point you synced and oneDrive assumed your local drive was newer and has overwritten the content it had with the local files cause very likely they had the same names as the old ones you played with.

Long story short: I don't think there's a way to recover your July/August saves unless you find them somewhere on your local drive or onedrive (which I don't think is likely since you already searched).

[crinrict]

@saminicolesc Did you check oneDrive before you sync'd ? Maybe you've overwritten the files by synching them and the game was using the ones on onedrive all along before.

I don't personally use onedrive at all but is there a way to check if there's an older version there ?

[saminicolesc]

So I went and looked through all of One Drive and I don't see any files differing from the same ones on my actual computer. When I look through my files for the game on One Drive, they're the exact same as the picture I attached; none of them being modified since June. The only thing that I saw had been modified after June was a lock file that says it was modified in August. And I've confirmed that those save files, both on my computer and the cloud, are just saves of those throwaway games I hadn't worked on. 

Even so, I turned off one drive before I started the game that had all my builds and households, so I would have assumed it wouldn't download onto the cloud, just on my computer? I haven't deleted anything related to the Sims since then, so I'm not sure where those saves could have gone at all.

And no, it doesn't seem like there's anyway to check for an older version.

[crinrict · Accepted solution]

@saminicolesc Are you sure those saves have been saved locally before ? Did they exist on your local drive or just in the game ? Like did you check the file system if they were present ?

Did you just turn off syncing or the usage of oneDrive entirely ?

I'm thinking more the game used the files on oneDrive and not the local ones. So basically those august files were on oneDrive only (not locally). There's no syncing needed for the game to use the files on one Drive as far as I'm aware.

When you then sync the drives, you've overwritten the oneDrive files with your local ones instead of the other way round.

The game does seem to like to switch between oneDrive and the local drive on patches so I'm guessing this is the scenario what happened:

1. The game used the local drive up to June, creating those files.
2. In July/August, the game used oneDrive to save the progress
3. When you now played again, it switched back to local, showing you only the June ones. Playing around then created those new files from 2021
4. At this point you synced and oneDrive assumed your local drive was newer and has overwritten the content it had with the local files cause very likely they had the same names as the old ones you played with.

Long story short: I don't think there's a way to recover your July/August saves unless you find them somewhere on your local drive or onedrive (which I don't think is likely since you already searched).

[saminicolesc]

Cool. Well thanks so much for the help! I'll scour One Drive again, and if not I guess I'll start over. Thanks!

[crinrict]

@saminicolesc make sure you have the files locally if you start over. If you're not using oneDrive, I would turn it off completely.