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Technical Issues

Save Games disappearing

September 5, 2014 /

Introductions

Nothing is more devastating then opening your game and all your save progress is gone. The game is like you never played before.

Backup your files in Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4\saves after each play session to prevent your saves from getting lost.

What usually happens is that the game can’t find the existing user folder and just creates a new one.

The most common cause for this issue is that the game reads a different folder than the one in Documents, like for example one in a cloud like oneDriveI/iCloud. Another reason could be that the folder in Documents was moved by accident.

Suggestions

Try the following general troubleshooting steps if your save have disappeared.

Tips to find out which folder the game is using can be found here: How to find your user folder.

Cloud saving has the advantage that you can use your save game from different computers but the disadvantage that you won’t find your save if you’re not online. The decision to use it is yours but make sure you know WHERE they are. If the game newly started to use the folder on your oneDrive and you want to keep that, you can simply move the files from your local documents folder to the cloud one and they should start to show up again the next time you start your game.

If you don’t want to use the cloud, you need to tell the game to not use the cloud. Unfortunately for oneDrive, it’s only possible to do it for the whole documents folder.. Steps to turn off oneDrive can be found here: Turn off or uninstall OneDrive

If you don’t use a cloud and your saves are gone anyways, try searching your computer for Sims 4 to see if there’s any other documents folder. If there is, just copy the files back to Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4\saves and the game will recognized them again.

Also make sure that the saves aren’t located in further sub folders as the game won’t recognize those.

Save games need to be named in a certain way for the game to recognize them. Saves that don’t follow the naming conventions shown below will not appear in your load menu.

Each save has a current save and up to 5 backups.

  • Save Game as shown in the load menu: Slot_xxxxxxxx.save. X is a hexadecimal number (0-9 and a-f)
  • Backups as shown if you click on the recover button on a certain save: Slot_xxxxxxxx.save.verY. Y is a number between 0-4

For Mac users find instructions here: Sims 3 and Sims 4 not loading save games.