Mysterious Change To My Games Folder

[twowolves80]

Pleasepleaseplease help me. I have no idea what happened or why, and not even my AV guys know wtf. 400+ hours of saves, gone.

Went to bed on Saturday after my Fallout 4 setup crashed yet again due to my garbage G.Skill memory cards (one of them is going bad), woke up next morning to play, suddenly, the My Games folder has a darker background than the surrounding icons, and all my saves are corrupted. Steam updated (don't really think it was that) and windows updated (but I don't think it was that, either--doesn't fit the usual Windows-type issues with Steam games and modded setups). When I load a save in Fallout 4, it immediately crashes.

I keep my games and Steam on the D: drive, separate from the C: where the OS is. The D: is a SeaGate HDD, 500GB, and it's only four or five years old, no noise, never a single issue. My system is more than capable of running stuff. liquid-cooled i7-4790K @ 4.0GHz, 2x8GB of G.Skill RAM, MSI GTX 980Ti G6 GPU, 850+ Gold-Rated EVGA PSU, 250GB SSD (for the OS).

All my drivers are up-to-date (with the exception of the NVidia, which just updated yet again tonight--seriously? Twice in two days??), and nothing stands out as a cause I could even point the suspicion to.

What I've done to solve it:

1. Tried running ReSaver. Every single file gives this error (taken from the ReSaver>Help>ShowLog function):

Version: 4.2.0-b110
SaveWindow constructed; took 1.1 s.
Updating filters.
Creating filters.
Updating filter.
Filter updated, took 2.4 ms.
Choosing a savegame.
================
Reading from savegame file "C:\Users\Michael\Documents\My Games\Fallout4\Saves\Save424_00000000M4D69636861656C_Commonwealth_050558_20191020013541_46_2.fos".
Updating filters.
Creating filters.
Updating filter.
Filter updated, took 1.2 ms.
Detected a new character encoding: UTF-8.
Error while reading file "Save424_00000000M4D69636861656C_Commonwealth_050558_20191020013541_46_2.fos".
Width (0) and height (0) cannot be <= 0
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Width (0) and height (0) cannot be <= 0

2. Tried running WryeBash, and the Saves boxes on the left panel are orange with a red checkmark. When you click on them, a dialogue box pops up with:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "bash\balt.pyo", line 1730, in OnItemSelected
File "bash\balt.pyo", line 1731, in _select
File "bash\basher\__init__.pyo", line 155, in SetDetails
File "bash\basher\__init__.pyo", line 153, in _setDetails
File "bash\basher\__init__.pyo", line 1933, in SetFile
File "bash\balt.pyo", line 187, in GetImage
File "wx\_core.pyo", line 3105, in SetData
wx._core.PyAssertionError: C++ assertion "Ok()" failed at ..\..\src\common\image.cpp(1577) in wxImage::SetData(): invalid image

3. Verified cache through Steam, and 6 files were missing that were replaced. No idea what. Ran BethIni afterwards to reset my inis.

4. Unticked the Read-Only button on the My Games folder Properties>General tab.

Everything looks kosher on the Vortex side, but what's weird is my DLCs don't have the green buttons next to them like the other mods do in the plugins tab. Was that always like that? No idea. Never paid attention, and not sure if it's significant or not (have you seen my signature?? there for a reason lol) so I figured err on the side of caution. If you want screenshots of the My Games folder, I got you, just ask.

If you want any other logs or whatnot, just ask. If this is in the wrong forum, I apologize, but the reason I placed it here is because, while I figure the saves and my 400+ hours are gone (I'm crying lol), I need to know what happened and why so it doesn't happen again. No point in playing if all my saves will be corrupted. Haven't actually tried that, yet, because I'm hoping to find a solution before it comes to that. Moderators, please move this to the correct forum if I've placed in the wrong spot?

Thank you ahead of time.

Edited October 23, 2019 by twowolves80

[Purr4me]

Does it look anything like this?

[twowolves80]

No, ma'am. It doesn't display a preview at all. It sees the saves (they're not dimmed, as in your screen shot), but the preview is a gray box.

[Purr4me]

No, ma'am. It doesn't display a preview at all. It sees the saves (they're not dimmed, as in your screen shot), but the preview is a gray box.

Something is installed incorrectly, the virtual file system can't find the data .If Vortex, there are menu adjustments you can make. But yes, something got snafued.

 

Log onto the root of Drive C:--scan for *,fos

Edited October 23, 2019 by Purr4me

[twowolves80]

There's nothing on the C: drive but the OS.

Steam didn't update around that time, so that's not it. The two things that did were NVidia and Windows. That said, I don't know enough about Vortex to know how to check whether something in the virtual filing system got jacked. I'm going to end up having to try to make a new My Games folder and ditch the old one, I think, because I can't figure out what changed. I have no guarantee that the problem isn't still there, waiting to corrupt more saves again, and even reinstalling Fallout 4 isn't going to cure the issue with the My Games folder. All the other games in it work, though. I don't get it.

Just dumb enough to not grasp the problem, but smart enough to know I'm too dumb to grasp the problem. lmao

I really appreciate your time in this, though. :)

[Purr4me]

There's nothing on the C: drive but the OS.

 

Steam didn't update around that time, so that's not it. The two things that did were NVidia and Windows. That said, I don't know enough about Vortex to know how to check whether something in the virtual filing system got jacked. I'm going to end up having to try to make a new My Games folder and ditch the old one, I think, because I can't figure out what changed. I have no guarantee that the problem isn't still there, waiting to corrupt more saves again, and even reinstalling Fallout 4 isn't going to cure the issue with the My Games folder. All the other games in it work, though. I don't get it.

 

Just dumb enough to not grasp the problem, but smart enough to know I'm too dumb to grasp the problem. lmao

 

I really appreciate your time in this, though. :smile:

If there is no trace of this extension " *,fos" then none of the other games saves will show up either...so, how are you going about the "search" ?

you should be finding Tons of entries.

 

windows search will show a preview of the source the files it finds, what your interested in is a fo4 source folder. but not the game folder.

I must be found in the C:\Users base directory or where ever Vortex was installed too.they have to be there

[twowolves80]

Sorry, lol I was thinking everything was on the D:, forgetting that the C:\Users\Michael\Documents\My Games\Fallout 4\Saves is on C:. See? lmao It's why I come with a warning label. lol

All the saves it's finding are the ones that are corrupted. They're the ones in the My Games folder that's botched. Hold on, I'd try to post a screen shot, but I can't find a site that nexus likes that won't return some weird error about it can't find the size of the image (???). I dunno.

Another weird thing, when set to small icons, the docs folder looks like a document icon, not a folder. That's also new.

Also, I never knew until now that you could look at save files in Vortex. Wtf. See, I set stuff in place as I fumble my way through a mod installation, then avoid touching it because I usually break it. That's why I don't really poke around in Vortex. My luck is infamous. That said, Vortex shows previews for some but not all. The ones that show, load in ReSaver. What did I do? No idea. They weren't working before.

 

(copied off bing, not an image hosting site)

Size-wise, they're up to 46MB, though one is 77MB--wtf? 45, 45, 77, 45, 45...lol No idea. ReSaver says, 145 plugins, 15724 strings, 2077 scripts (hey-o!), 143,657 script instances, 170,667 change forms...I can post the ReSaver log...can save files become too big?

I'm going to try to load one and see what happens. I thought they were all corrupted because I was picking at random after the first three and must have been hitting bad ones.

Edited October 24, 2019 by twowolves80

[Purr4me]

please don't post large text here, it's not necessary.

https://postimages.org

[twowolves80]

Yes, ma'am. I am happy to say that the other saves load. Only have an hour or so off of settlement building, but not worried about it. My OCPD just went, "Ahhhh..." lol

So, now, to figure out what would bork saves randomly in the save folder? Looking through the vortex portion, it's completely random.

[Purr4me]

Yes, ma'am. I am happy to say that the other saves load. Only have an hour or so off of settlement building, but not worried about it. My OCPD just went, "Ahhhh..." lol

 

So, now, to figure out what would bork saves randomly in the save folder? Looking through the vortex portion, it's completely random.

In most applications that make use of windows metrics, there should be a tab at the top of the listed games, saved game viewing windows that you can click by time or date or name.

This is a windows sort feature.