Profiles Lost

[Wererommel]

My sad story: I was playing Skyrim SE, all normal, today when I noticed one of my player home was missing. Naturally, I suspected a boot error, so I shut everything down and rebooted. Still no home.

 

I didn't want to lose my work, so I reverted to the Vortex save from three days previous. I was told it needed repair, so I did that. When I rebooted, Skyrim was gone from Vortex. It was no longer being managed. Some repair.

 

I then booted from Steam. Everything normal, but of course no mods. Saved.

 

Booted from Vortex again, still no Skyrim. Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 were there, but not Skyrim. Again, I had the option to restored Vortex from the latest save (today). I did that. It said repair was needed, so I did that too. Skyrim was still gone, no mods, no profiles nothing.

 

Clicked "Games" and "Skyrim SE". I could only boot from "Default", it was like I had never played. Then, I got this message:

 

I swear I haven't added or removed any mods outside of Vortex. Now, I apparently can't play again without losing all information irreversibly. Is there any way out of this hole, or do I have to start again from the beginning? Is there anyway to prevent this from happening again?

[Guest deleted34304850]

that looks bad. i've never seen that message appear before.

one question - do you have any backups of your save games/mod folders etc?

[Wererommel]

I have a complete mods file (unless it has somehow been damaged), plus all my saves. Only Vortex doesn't recognize them.

[Tannin42]

When this error message occurs with a complete list of your mods, that usually means you changed/reverted the path of the staging folder outside Vortex, this probably happened when you reverted to a backup.

 

If you clicked "Quit Vortex" on that dialog it can still be saved, please read these instructions completely before you do it.

 

- Figure out where your staging folder for SSE is. You almost definitively changed it through settings->mods at some point and put it on the same drive as your game.

- When you know the staging path, open a command prompt and cd to your vortex installation directory

cd "c:\Program Files\Black Tree Gaming Ltd\Vortex\"

- Now run

Vortex --set "settings.mods.installPath.skyrimse=\"c:\\vortex mods\\skyrimse\""

You have to type it exactly like this, with the spaces, with the quotes around everything after --set, with the \" around the actual path and with double backslashes (\\) instead of regular ones.

Instead of c:\vortex mods\skyrimse you use the correct staging path for your setup of course!

 

If you use shared mode in Vortex (if you don't know what that is you probably don't) use this command instead.

Vortex --shared --set "settings.mods.installPath.skyrimse=\"c:\\vortex mods\\skyrimse\""

You should get a confirmation on the prompt saying "changed"

 

If you made a mistake in the path that's not usually a big deal, just repeat with the correct value.

 

- Finally you can run this command to double check you did this correctly:

Vortex --get "settings.mods.installPath.skyrimse"

This should then show something like this:

settings.mods.installPath.skyrimse = "I:\\Vortex Mods\\skyrimse"

If you did everything correctly you should now be able to start Vortex again, not get the error message and all your mods should be there.

[Wererommel]

Sorry, I'm confused. Vortex has always been on the D: drive, the same as my game, and I certainly haven't moved it in the last three days:

 

USER (D:) > Vortex

 

Is that the "staging path"? I don't know. The game is at:

 

USER (D:) > Fallout 4 > steamapps > common > Skyrim Special Edition

 

And I haven't moved it either.

 

(I put it on the D: drive because C: was getting full. I had originally installed Fallout 4 in its own folder, not knowing that all the steam apps were going in there.)

 

I should probably have mentioned that I have a copy of the skrimse folder from Vortex via Carbonite. I also have a copy of the Vortex folder from 4-21-21 on backup. (I'm kind of a fanatic for backing things up, though it seldom seems to do me any good.)

[Tannin42]

The staging folder is separate and independent from where you installed Vortex to. The Vortex folder contains only the application files (.exe, .dll, ...). The staging folder contains your actual mods whereas your game directory contains only links to that staging folder.

 

By default the staging folder is on c:\users\<username>\appdata\roaming\vortex\skyrimse\mods but because it has to be on the same drive as your game, Vortex definitively asked you to change it and you definitively did or you wouldn't have been able to install mods.

If you followed the suggestion Vortex made, your staging folder will be "d:\vortex mods\skyrimse" otherwise you put in something custom.

[rmm200]

I don't know if Carbonite preserves hard links or not. Windows copy does not.

What typically happens is that the copy process replaces the hard link with an actual copy of what the link pointed to.

That pretty much destroys Vortex' ability to manage your game.

Before you use any method to back up your game - issue Purge from within Vortex first. That removes all the hard links for the copy.

Then Deploy after the copy restores them all.

[Tannin42]

I don't know if Carbonite preserves hard links or not. Windows copy does not.

What typically happens is that the copy process replaces the hard link with an actual copy of what the link pointed to.

That pretty much destroys Vortex' ability to manage your game.

Before you use any method to back up your game - issue Purge from within Vortex first. That removes all the hard links for the copy.

Then Deploy after the copy restores them all.

 

It's not actually that bad. If you were to restore a backup of the game directory, with the Vortex AppData and staging directories either untouched or also restored, Vortex would give you an "External File Change" dialog that lists every single file as modified (because they were turned from hard link into "real" files) but then no matter which option you pick (save or restore) everything should be fine since the content of the files between staging and game directory is still identical.

[Pickysaurus]

If you can't remember where your staging folder used to be you can try looking at the vortex_deployment.json file that (may) be in your data folder. It should look something like this:

{
  "instance": "b1651190-9010-4394-9036-c728a34de5fd",
  "version": 1,
  "deploymentMethod": "hardlink_activator",
  "gameId": "citiesskylines",
  "deploymentTime": 1621159000570,
  "stagingPath": "C:\\Users\\MikeW\\AppData\\Roaming\\Vortex\\citiesskylines\\mods",
  "targetPath": "C:\\Users\\MikeW\\AppData\\Local\\Colossal Order\\Cities_Skylines",
  "files": []
}

"stagingPath" is where the mods were staging the last time you successfully deployed them.

[Wererommel]

Much mucking about in Powershell just gets me this. Attempting to boot Vortex gets me the same dumb message.

 

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