Need advice

[JanuarySnow]

I'll keep it simple, Woke up this morning and my Skyrim SE data folder is gone. Nowhere on my computer, including my NMM data as well. Don't know what happened. Yesterday I played some Skyrim. Went to bed. Woke up and the data folder was gone. Hundreds of mods and folders gone. Custom animations I've gathered for years and converted and edited myself, gone. The data folder isn't in the recycle bin. It's not in any of my drives and Steam can't locate it when I browse local files. After a few hours and a new monitor, keyboard, mouse and controller later, I don't know what to do, which is why I'm here.

Is this just a big "time to move on moment"? Thousands of hours over 10 years, I've invested so much into getting Skyrim EXACTLY how I want it. The time it took to even to get to this point. Things like learning how to get Racemenu and ECE to co-exist to use certain mods. Learning how to convert files, creating custom bodyslide presets, face presets, converting hundreds of MP3s to XWF files, EVEN BUYING A FULLY CUSTOM COMPUTER JUST FOR SKYRIM. Thousands of dollars, thousands of hours. Gone. I've combed my entire C:Drive and it's like the data folder never existed. Even my SKSE file is gone. The only evidence of of a modded Skyrim SE is my NMM, with the mods still listed and checked green. to install them all into this new data folder I gotta uninstall them all and then reinstall, then rollback Skyrim SE itself to 1.6.6.4

 

Is this even worth it? It's like Skyrim was completely reverted to it's vanilla state. It's like I never modded Skyrim ever. The time it's gonna take to get back to what it was...The custom voices, the custom animations, the custom music...

 

Has this ever happened to anyone before? What should I do? I wanna start over again because Skyrim is one of my favorite games and at this point it's just because of the mods. Now with it all gone and to even start to rebuild would take HOURS, maybe days. Skyrim is so customizable more than any other game but it takes time and patience and I don't think I wanna start from absolute zero after all these years.

Edited August 26 by JanuarySnow

[ModEnjoyer52]

Suggested option 1: Restore from backup.

Suggested option 2: Look at Windows Event Viewer and see if anything updated, anti-virus quarantined the folder, or figure out what happened and reverse it. Try not to change things around too much in case its not really deleted and make a full backup of the disk.

Suggested option 3: Learn to love modding more than playing and use your experience to start from scratch to make it even better than before.

Suggested option 4: Your Skyrim days are over, wait for TESVI.

[JanuarySnow]

7 minutes ago, ModEnjoyer52 said:

Suggested option 1: Restore from backup.

Suggested option 2: Look at Windows Event Viewer and see if anything updated, anti-virus quarantined the folder, or figure out what happened and reverse it. Try not to change things around too much in case its not really deleted and make a full backup of the disk.

Suggested option 3: Learn to love modding more than playing and use your experience to start from scratch to make it even better than before.

Suggested option 4: Your Skyrim days are over, wait for TESVI.

I checked Windows event Viewer and there's tons of errors over NMM. IDK how it would erase my entire data folder. A lot of these messages

 

"The program NexusClient.exe version 0.65.2.0 stopped interacting with Windows and was closed. To see if more information about the problem is available, check the problem history in the Security and Maintenance control panel."

 

Oh boy i'm just now remembering from yesterday before bed, I had a save issue out of the blue. It was a corrupted in-game save file. Yesterday I saw something I never saw before. When I went to load a previous file the image box was a rainbow of colors with the words "no img" on top of the colors. In the text box that would appear when loading the new save I got the message "save corrupted". Could a corrupted save file take down entire game folder?

 

[alphafr]

Usually corrupted files don't get auto deleted, or you would have found them in your dustbin

 

What you can try, right click and properties on the folder that housed all of it, if its 0Mb then the file got moved somewhere or deleted for whatever reason for sure

 

If its game sized, you're cooked

 

This is why I have around 150Gb of space to have a copy of my mods and game in case of major issues

 

if you want to get that far to recover it either do a full restore from backup at your own risk (it will erase everything you did after that backup was made) as suggested or send the computer to a specialized center for data recovery maybe they can find the files even if deleted

Edited August 26 by alphafr

[alphafr]

Rather worrying AND important found someone with a similar issue with other suggestion to follow, although only the mods are gone for him

 

 

You might need to backup everything on that drive if its the hardrive starting to fail

Edited August 26 by alphafr

[Karna5]

I'm blind and can't read (today can barely open my eyes), but I'm assuming you've been correctly told already that your issue is nearly certainly physical and that most likely your hard drive is failing.

The only thing you can try, on the 2% chance you simply lost a mount of your drive, is rebooting. However, if your drive is, as I assume, failing, it may not come back after the reboot. It may be already dead.

Get any passwords you may have saved on it onto somewhere safe before you try rebooting.

When you are coming up from the reboot, also try going into your bios and check what the bios considers the status of your drive. Often modern PC bios firmware is capable of detecting imminent hard drive failure and will let you know.

Sorry for your pain. But on the flip side, after you go through the week or two of misery recovering onto a new hard drive, you may end up with something bigger and faster

[JanuarySnow]

I've had about a week to more or less "deal" with this. and I've read all the replies (and thank you all by the way) and I think I'll start over. Maybe it was needed. As far as the total erasure of the data folder, it happened on a 1 year old

i9 Alienware with a 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13900KF, 3000 Mhz, 24 Cores, 32 Logical Processors. 

Installed Physical Memory (RAM)    64.0 GB
Total Physical Memory    63.7 GB

Total Virtual Memory    67.7 GB
Available Physical Memory    48.3 GB

(Not counting the extra external hard drives.)

 

I had 3 entire total system scans for viruses and the like which took forever. Some of my suspicions lead me to thinking it was one of my external hard drives. One of them had the same issue I had with my erased Skyrim folder and the only option was to format it. The other makes noise when games are played. Like irregular paced beeping noises. I thought it that whatever killed my data folder could've been the same thing that killed my external hard drive, but I remembered that Skyrim SE was installed on the C:Drive...Which lead to me thinking it was some sort of infection...but again nothing else anywhere was deleted or even altered.

I still can't find the issue and I'm just glad it was only the Skyrim folder. It gave me a sort of "count your blessings" type of feeling. I played other games like GTA Online...not doing that again lol, and I went out and touched grass. Puts everything into perspective. Had the computer checked by a friend of mine who is just way more knowledgeable, he read this thread and just went into the entire computer and he thinks it could've been an honest to goodness anomaly. Everything else seems to work just fine. All the other games and programs operate just fine.

 I think the main fix for Skyrim is just opening up NMM and just reinstalling 120 mods. My hope is that the backup animation files I have are the absolute current ones I made a copy of. I can rebuild most everything else, the music, the voices and such, but those animations are the lynchpin to the rebuild.

 

Creation and destruction... Time to create again.

 

 

[AaronOfMpls]

Indeed, stuff like this is why I keep backups of my mod folders and download folders.  The working copy of my mods (which MO2 uses) lives on my SSD along with my OS and the game.  I back it up to my hard drive once in a while.  And I back up my hard drive (which also has my screenshots, save files, and downloaded zips/7zs/rars) to an external drive a few times per week.

I started backing up my hard drive much more regularly after a few weeks' worth of irreplaceable files got corrupted last year.  Now if it happens again, I won't lose more than a day or three at most.

[drsemmel]

49 minutes ago, AaronOfMpls said:

I started backing up my hard drive much more regularly after a few weeks' worth of irreplaceable files got corrupted last year.  Now if it happens again, I won't lose more than a day or three at most.

Thats what I keep telling myself time and time again. I make full backups every ~2weeks if I can. My current skyrim setup alone takes hours to copy on my external HD (and I don´t want it to run when I am not home, so I often just don´t bother)

[AaronOfMpls]

I'm on Linux, and do incremental backups via an rsync command in the terminal.*  Only the first one took hours**; every one since takes only a few minutes to copy over all the new or changed files. 

(I also have system restore points on that backup drive, via Timeshift.)

 

* rsync [source drive]/. [destination drive]/[backup folder] -av to be (somewhat) precise.

** which I sped up by connecting the drive internally over SATA.  I later pulled it out and put it back in its external USB case.