Fixing/Recovering Saved Game - Saved Game Not in Game Launcher or Corrupted

[athena]

I just had my Seasons installed. Then my game crashed. The whole town did not show up I the main menu. So I followed these instructions. I was able to recover my town. Played for about 15 minutes and then the game blacked out and crashed again. The following day. I can no longer open the whole game it says " ,"Can't start game. Please re-install the Base Game". Can someone please tell me what happened? I did exactly as I read in the instructions for my bad files. This never happened to me before Seasons. What to do? Thanks!

[iheartcowcapoos]

I just want to say thanks because this saved my game! i was plagued with the mac "exception raised" error only on one save file and couldn't load the game. Doing this fix worked! Thanks so much

[Chocolate168]

I have followed all of the steps and my game file is now appearing in the menu, if I click the tick to load it the game crashes. How do I stop this?

[deedee_828]

I don't know if this will help anyone else, but I wanted share my missing saved game fix, or I should say my husband's fix.
When I went to play today, my last saved game was not in the main menu. We quickly searched the forum and found this thread.
The save was in my Sims 3 saves folder, so we tried the factory reset but the save game was still missing.
So then he tried the meta.data file transfer per instructions from here but still no saved game showing in the main menu.
He then tried saving another town as a test, and it did save to the main menu but then another saved game was missing! (I save my games sequentially as I play families in that neighborhood so it's real easy to notice when a number isn't there)

He had asked earlier if there was a limit to how many games you could have in the main menu.
I had no idea and we hadn't seen anything about that being a known problem/issue.
He decided it was worth a shot. He archived/moved about 24 saved files with backups from my Sims 3 saves folder to my external hard drive.
And voila!---saved games 29 and 30 were back, completely intact, as well as the "silouette" family from the meta.data transfer we had tried earlier.

I had never heard that there was a limit to saved games in the main menu, but moving older saved games out of the folder did the trick for me!

This site has helped me out with several issues, so I thought I would pass this on in case it could help anyone else having a similar issue.

[derickd289]

Hi, this is a last resort I have tried many things including the instructions you laid out and still can't seem to load my saved file. Let me give you some history of my problem. I had Sims 3 for PC CD version for about 4 years. I haven't played it for a year and a half. I lost my CD and I wanted to play it again. So I followed instruction to get my key ID number and then got the digital download from origin. I then uninstalled the CD version off my computer copying and pasting the Sims 3 folder to my desktop to keep my saved file. I then installed the digital download version, which I think already backed my save file up with the cloud because in My Documents my previous save files were already in there. So I start up the game and I have no access to my saved games. But when I do start a new game my Sim is available to pick as a household, but my house isnt there. I talked to EA support and they are telling me file is corrupt and that there's nothing I can do. So I followed your instructions and still nothing. Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong or is my backup corrupted and I pretty much have nothing else i can do. I will appreciate any type of feedback.

Thank you.

[milty111]

Greetings all. I have tried to correct my problem by making backup copies of my save game files and also replacing the meta data files from a temporary town but to no avail. My problem is as follows:

2 of 4 of my Sims family are on vacation in France. They have previously visited China but not Egypt. When I use the phone to go home or wait until the trip time is over, my Sunset Valley home appears with the 2 Sims that stayed back from the trip, but only one of them is accessible with the other's icon being a green square. The 2 returning Sims are also without face icons and also inaccessible.  When I hover the mouse pointer over any of the green squares, the name of the Sim appears. Any help fixing this will be much appreciated.

I have the EP's World Adventures and University.
I also have a number of custom content installed but they have never caused me any problems for the past 3 years.

[Pam]

Hi, this is a last resort I have tried many things including the instructions you laid out and still can't seem to load my saved file. Let me give you some history of my problem. I had Sims 3 for PC CD version for about 4 years. I haven't played it for a year and a half. I lost my CD and I wanted to play it again. So I followed instruction to get my key ID number and then got the digital download from origin. I then uninstalled the CD version off my computer copying and pasting the Sims 3 folder to my desktop to keep my saved file. I then installed the digital download version, which I think already backed my save file up with the cloud because in My Documents my previous save files were already in there. So I start up the game and I have no access to my saved games. But when I do start a new game my Sim is available to pick as a household, but my house isnt there. I talked to EA support and they are telling me file is corrupt and that there's nothing I can do. So I followed your instructions and still nothing. Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong or is my backup corrupted and I pretty much have nothing else i can do. I will appreciate any type of feedback.

Thank you.

Welcome to our Forum.  It sounds like you've already done everything you can do.  If EA says your file is corrupt, it probably is and there's nothing to be done about a corrupt file.  It was probably made especially worse because of the gap in between the times you played. 

Greetings all. I have tried to correct my problem by making backup copies of my save game files and also replacing the meta data files from a temporary town but to no avail. My problem is as follows:

2 of 4 of my Sims family are on vacation in France. They have previously visited China but not Egypt. When I use the phone to go home or wait until the trip time is over, my Sunset Valley home appears with the 2 Sims that stayed back from the trip, but only one of them is accessible with the other's icon being a green square. The 2 returning Sims are also without face icons and also inaccessible.  When I hover the mouse pointer over any of the green squares, the name of the Sim appears. Any help fixing this will be much appreciated.

I have the EP's World Adventures and University.
I also have a number of custom content installed but they have never caused me any problems for the past 3 years.

Welcome to you as well, milty111.

What you have encountered is a known bug with traveling.  There's nothing to be done with that current file.  If you saved before the trip, you might be able to recover that save file by following the instructions in the first post of this thread.  I believe the bug has been fixed in a recent patch.  If your game isn't current with the most recent update, I recommend you get it updated so that, hopefully, this won't happen again.

[milty111]

Thanks for the quick reply!

I think I have a save in Sunset Valley before the trip to France, but not sure how to get the game to load that specific file. I didn't see that detail in the original post. My games are all current.

File names are Sunset Valley_0x0859db3cExportDB.package and same with .nhd suffix.


______________________________

I finally ended up packing up the household into the family inventory and evicting the family with house then re-placing them at the property. Lost some wants/desires and have to place all the items back in the house, but so far seems to be working. Also lost everything that was in the personal inventory of 3 of the Sims in the household, the ones without their face icons. Oh well. Easy enough to replace.

[seejaneplay]

Your post just saved my seven-generation legacy. From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU! 

[quinti.sims]

 ::)Thank you for the help

[BiirgitteL]

I would love to say this also worked for me but sadly it didn't  I was playing yesterday and the game crased. I didn't think to much about it since I had to go to bed anyways, but after the crash I downloaded some hair, clothing and other stuff with no problem. Today I downloaded the extentionpack "Pets" and restarted my Mac (I didn't turn it off yesterday). When I looked in my game launcher all my downloads was gone - and when I started the game not only was my family gone but also all my other settings was reset. I have tried to follow these steps but still my family is gone - also all my downloads. All the files are still in the documents folder, but none of them works What can I do?

Edit: I think I found the crash-report ...
"[------- Crash Report -------]

   Created: Thu Jun 13 00:43:35 2013
   Exception 0xc0000005 occurred at 0x0x7c4713b3: Access violation writing location 0x00000000

[------- Process Info -------]

   PID 4 crashed in TID 2"

[XxSimsMovieGirlxX]

Okay so what happened was I was playing my game, and all of a sudden, my game froze, but trees were still moving, it was still snowfalling, but time froze and my sims froze. So I had to force log off of my user. Then I went back to my game, and there was a save that i did long ago, but I was saving recently, but it started with my old save All my hard work was gone and i had to restart everything. Is there a way I can get my newest save back?
I did everything you said, and it's still the same save

[Seabody]

Okay so what happened was I was playing my game, and all of a sudden, my game froze, but trees were still moving, it was still snowfalling, but time froze and my sims froze. So I had to force log off of my user. Then I went back to my game, and there was a save that i did long ago, but I was saving recently, but it started with my old save All my hard work was gone and i had to restart everything. Is there a way I can get my newest save back?
I did everything you said, and it's still the same save

Did you delete the original? If so, open up the Recycle Bin (on Windows), and the folder should be there. If it is, right click it, there should be an option called "Restore". If not, go to Properties, and then click Restore.

[XxSimsMovieGirlxX]

Did you delete the original? If so, open up the Recycle Bin (on Windows), and the folder should be there. If it is, right click it, there should be an option called "Restore". If not, go to Properties, and then click Restore.

But I thought Carl said that I had to delete the original and rename my backup to the same name as the original one Plus my recycling bin deletes stuff that goes in there automatically and I've deleted since last night...

[Seabody]

Ah, then I'm afraid you can't get it back. Deleting from the Recycling Bin is, as far as I know, permanent.

And Carl said you had to delete the original, but if you do the steps in reverse you can usually regain the original save.