All the people in my neighborhood are gone [ Edited ]

[0cf041e734945b68]

All the people in my neighborhood are gone! How can I put them back again? I turned off our laptop while the game was saving because I didn't want it to save, but now when I opened the game, everyone's gone.

[roberta591]

@0cf041e734945b68  You can just exit the game in the menu. This is not the same as save and exit. Just exiting will exit to desktop without saving. When you force shutdown (crash) the result is unpredictable (usually not good). You could try to restore a previous save - link - recover previous save game

[0cf041e734945b68]

@roberta591 Your link sent me here: https://help.ea.com/en/contact-us/
I searched "recover previous save game" and found this: https://help.ea.com/en-us/help/the-sims/the-sims-3/how-to-recover-a-missing-saved-game-in-the-sims-3...

I followed the instructions but when I loaded the game, this message appeared:

I clicked the check and the screen was just black with the music playing for several hours.

When I restarted the game, the same message appears after loading.

[roberta591]

@0cf041e734945b68 My guess is the saves are corrupt and recovery is is probably not possible. I can only recommend deleting and moving the present saves and starting a new game. I usually do an occasional save as to create a save under a different name just so I have a back up.

[0cf041e734945b68]

@roberta591 Thank you for your replies. I searched the web and found this: http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:A_Serious_Error_Has_Occurred#Option_2:_Manually_unlock...

I followed it and now I'm loading the game. I'll post if it's successful or not.

[0cf041e734945b68]

It didn't work. @roberta591

[roberta591]

@0cf041e734945b68  Sorry about the bad link but you did find the correct instructions on how to recover an old save. A good guess is the saves are not recoverable. This game creates temporary files depending what you are doing. These files must be properly closed or merged and closed to ensure integrity. If you don't properly close open files in Windows or OS X prior to shutting down (crashing the program) the state of these files is unpredictable and usually it isn't good. Operating systems (Windows) expects the files to be a specific structure. If you crash an application that has open files (Sims 3) it is possible (most likely) these open files will be corrupt. This game moves a lot of data around and when you exit the gamesave files are created and closed and other temp files are cleaned up and the game exits to desktop. Should you crash the program or you have a power outage or anything that causes the game to stop running for any reason there is a great possibility of file corruption. The corruption probably happened somewhere when the game was making the backup image and trying to save the current game to the old slot. To manually recover these files requires intimate knowledge of this game's file structures and this information is seldom public knowledge.