Profiles Lost

[Guest deleted34304850]

Someone should relabel this thread "Paradise Lost", for verily, we are journeying down into the lower regions.

 

Things That Man Was Not Meant To Know:

 

Poking through the Vortex files, I found a "IndexedDB" folder, which sounded very promising, but inside I found this, a Google advertising link. Granted that Vortex is indexed somewhere in Google, how did an ad link get into a player's DB folder? And this is supposed to be a text file, a simple log, but it's full of binary code. Is there some secret ad deal between Google and Vortex, or is this malware that has infected my machine?

this is utterly irrelevant to your issue, there is no malware from vortex. it's open source - download it and take a look. but in the meantime, before you put your tinfoil hat on, can you give us more details about what you have done, outside of vortex control that has caused your issue? every time you've suggested that vortex has done something, such as delete a mod or mods automatically seems to be the result of an action you have performed.

 

what have you done "poking around" that has caused your issue?

 

have you performed some sort of partial restore from a backup? have you deleted files?

you say you take regular backups - thats fine - but - how often do you restore from them? restoral is a little more complex than simply overwriting files, especially with something like vortex. The more I read about your issues, the more I am certain that you've done something outside of vortex and messed up everything and you want to scapegoat Vortex when the reality is, its going off the information in its files and folders which has been compromised by some external action.

 

what could that external action be?

 

i'm going to say it's nothing to do with google.

Edited May 27, 2021 by 1ae0bfb8

[Guest deleted34304850]

There are usually other programs going on in the backgroud: browsers, back-up programs and the virus checker. Possibly one of them accessed a file at the same time that Vortex was trying to load it? Seems like this would happen much more often, if that were the cause.

this is pure guesswork. this is not how analysis and problem solving works. you need to be able to tell us what has happened outside of vortex, and not make up stuff to suit your argument.

[Wererommel]

 

Someone should relabel this thread "Paradise Lost", for verily, we are journeying down into the lower regions.

 

Things That Man Was Not Meant To Know:

 

Poking through the Vortex files, I found a "IndexedDB" folder, which sounded very promising, but inside I found this, a Google advertising link. Granted that Vortex is indexed somewhere in Google, how did an ad link get into a player's DB folder? And this is supposed to be a text file, a simple log, but it's full of binary code. Is there some secret ad deal between Google and Vortex, or is this malware that has infected my machine?

this is utterly irrelevant to your issue, there is no malware from vortex. it's open source - download it and take a look. but in the meantime, before you put your tinfoil hat on, can you give us more details about what you have done, outside of vortex control that has caused your issue? every time you've suggested that vortex has done something, such as delete a mod or mods automatically seems to be the result of an action you have performed.

 

what have you done "poking around" that has caused your issue?

 

have you performed some sort of partial restore from a backup? have you deleted files?

you say you take regular backups - thats fine - but - how often do you restore from them? restoral is a little more complex than simply overwriting files, especially with something like vortex. The more I read about your issues, the more I am certain that you've done something outside of vortex and messed up everything and you want to scapegoat Vortex when the reality is, its going off the information in its files and folders which has been compromised by some external action.

 

what could that external action be?

 

i'm going to say it's nothing to do with google.

 

You say it has nothing to do with Google, but you don't explain why I have a Google ad link in my database index. This is naturally a matter of concern.

 

I started "poking around" in Vortex AFTER the disaster. (I figured I had nothing left to lose.) I tried booting from my Vortex backup; when that didn't work, I swapped it back. I also tried swapping in the skyrimse folder from Carbonite. That didn't work either, so I swapped it back. Other than that, I haven't changed a thing.

 

Not sure why you are so intent on blaming me for this. I have no way of accessing the database and have never meddled with it.

 

All my other files are intact: the profiles, the mod folder, the load order, the saves, none of that was changed.

[Wererommel]

 

There are usually other programs going on in the backgroud: browsers, back-up programs and the virus checker. Possibly one of them accessed a file at the same time that Vortex was trying to load it? Seems like this would happen much more often, if that were the cause.

this is pure guesswork. this is not how analysis and problem solving works. you need to be able to tell us what has happened outside of vortex, and not make up stuff to suit your argument.

 

That's easy. Nothing happened other than what I described. If you have another explanation, besides suggesting that I'm lying, let's hear it.

[Guest deleted34304850]

i havent accused you of lying. i'm trying to understand how your issue occurred. what you have told us is only part of the story. im trying to understand what is missing from the story to complete the picture.

the only person who knows that is you.

 

i won't guess as to how your issues occurred, but based on my own experience of vortex and computers in general - what you described about mods simply being deleted without any input from you does not happen.

 

i have asked you what actions you have taken, and you've not answered them, instead you've gone off down a google rabbit hole. when you're ready to talk about your actions, that precluded this issue throw a post up.

[Tannin42]

I've already explained what happened. You updated mods by first uninstalling the old one, then restored an application state from before the update. I'm not sure why this is still being discussed, that is definitively what's happening, Vortex even explicitly says that that is what's going to happen if you restore a backup for no good reason.

And if you looked at the actual staging folder you'd see that you have different versions of the mods that what Vortex is missing.

 

regarding the google link: yeah, look at all the ads inside Vortex... sigh.

 

Vortex is built around chrome and uses chrome for its embedded webbrowser. IndexedDB is the db that that browser uses for its own storage, it has nothing to do with Vortex's own data.

You're probably looking at a cookie from some website you browsed to.

 

Not sure why you are so intent on blaming me for this.

 

 

No one is blaming you, this is your own system. What I'm telling you is that you caused this yourself, 100% guaranteed.

Vortex did not randomly delete files and there is no secret conspiracy between google and us to break your modding setup...

You are welcome to dig into random files making up random stuff all day long but it won't get you any closer to an actual solution...

[Guest deleted34304850]

@tannin42 - based on the limited information above - is there a method than can be used to retrieve the situation?

 

it all depends on what the OP's backups contain, but I am wondering, if the OP's backups contain their entire appdata folder and entire download archives complete and intact, is it possible to restore everything from a time before this occurred and get their set up back, or, has this been compromised beyond repair because of subsequent actions?

[Tannin42]

Depends on the backups. Point is that staging folder and database have to be in sync, if he can revert his staging folder to the same status as the application state he should be golden.

 

But also: If the "Mods changed on disk" message only lists a couple of mods and those are mods that have been updated, that is not a catastrophe. He can just click "Apply Changes" and go on with his life. My entire initial warning to quit and fix the staging path setting was based on the assumption that the had been corrupted and all mods were no longer detected.

 

Now after hitting "Apply Changes" the affected mods will be disabled and be missing meta data, so they need to be re-enabled and then I'd advice to reinstall them in the not-too-distant future because they won't get updates any more (due to missing meta data) but that is neither urgent nor game-breaking.

[Guest deleted34304850]

this is incredibly interesting to me.

 

a question - is there a way, via a command or any other method to display the internals you mention in your reply, such as the application state. what i mean by that is, does the application state contain any information around when a mod was added/updated versus what is contained in the staging folder?

 

for example, let's assume that i updated a mod from v1 to v2, then outside of vortex deleted the update in the staging folder and re-added v1 in the staging folder. now, i have a discrepancy between my staging folder and what vortex thinks should be there. this situation will generate the "mods changed on disk" warning.

 

is there any means available where i could list what vortex thinks i should have, versus what i've actually got? so that as well as getting the mods changed on disk message, i can actually use vortex to tell me that it thinks i need v2 of my mod, but it's not present in the staging folder?

[Wererommel]

All this fuss, and no one has asked if I checked the disk for errors, in retrospect an obvious thing to do. I just checked C: and did find a number of errors. Did they cause the disaster? Possibly, but there is no way to be sure. The D: disk was error free, and that had both Skyrim and Vortex on it. However, the database was on C: (no way to change that). Unfortunately, the database is locked to users, so I can't examine it, much less fix any problems.

 

Looks like I'll have to forget about all those intact game files and start over, but not before I replace the C: disk.