Restoring lost Save Games

[braelef]

Hi guys,

 

I lost 3 saves. I used ShadowExplorer to go to the user/username/Saved Games/... folder and restore all the files.

 

However, whenever I load the game it does not recognize the lost saves, only the current saves. I have verified the restored lost saves are not corrupt. 

 

Is there another folder I need to work w/ to restore saved games? It seems like PoE has some backup of that folder or something so that when PoE loads it reads from the backup, not from the current source? idk

 

Any help appreciated.

 

Thank you!

Anthony

 

 

[AstralWanderer]

Welcome to the forums Braelef,

 

ShadowExplorer can restore backups made by the Volume Shadow Copy Service. If the files were corrupted in any way beforehand, then the copies will have the same problem. It may be worth checking the file extensions - they should be .savegame but in my experience, Pillars also writes a number of other files to the savegame folder with random extensions. If your files have a different extension, changing it to .savegame might help.

 

As the website notes, ShadowExplorer is not a substitue for a proper backup regime - the Shadow Copy Service will only make one copy a day and those backups will be lost in the event of a disk failure. Consider file versioning software which makes a copy every time a file is changed or added to a folder - I'd recommend Aphar Backup (Dutch webpage but program is in English) but AutoVer, Yadis Backup (all free) and FileHamster (commercial) are alternatives. Set one of these up to copy savegames to a folder on another disk and they should usefully supplement full image backups taken on a less regular (weekly/monthly) basis.

Edited April 26, 2015 by AstralWanderer

[braelef]

Hi Astral. Thanks for your response. 

 

Are you suggesting then that that folder is the only place that a saved game's data is pulled from? Are you sure there's not some other variable at play here.

 

What happened was my save files were strictly deleted. They weren't corrupted or anything like that. And the files that I have are the exact same files that were present before they got deleted.  There's no difference at all.

 

It would be the same as if I copied the saves to a folder on the desktop, loaded PoE and deleted the files in game, then tried pasting them back in. It doesn't work. 

 

I think there is some other file that gets modified when a new character is made. It's possible that the saves are recognized, but  that the "name" isn't in there so it doesn't display them in the load menu. In other words, I have two characters, Araene and Riel. Since Riel was the one who was deleted, maybe I need to go in some other file to turn it back on. PoE seems to load from memory. I.e., if you delete the entire contents of Saved Games, then load PoE, it will restore those files from some unknown location. I need to figure out where that is from.

 

Thanks

[AstralWanderer]

Saved games are stored in %USERPROFILE%\My Documents\My Games\Pillars of Eternity on my system using the GOG version of PoE. No other folder is used, and I don't recognise the folder you mention. You might want to check whether a folder of the same name exists on your system and, if so, try copying your restored saves to it.

 

If you are using the Steam version of PoE and are using cloud saves, then a problem there could be causing file deletion (see Steam Community: My save was deleted!). In that case, disabling cloud saves and keeping local backups would seem a better choice.

[braelef]

Thanks for your reply AW. Steam uses the filepath mentioned. Cloud thing isn't at play. I may have to recreate. Can't figure out why it won't take the file.