did i accidentally deleted my career?

[king of nowhere]

i decided to try running sandbox to see how it looks with the parts i'm still missing.

so i went to create new game, and i didn't bother to change the default name. it asked me if i wanted to overwrite the save, and i said ok, because i wasn't even using the default save, i keep lots of saved games anyway.

so i check what i wanted to check, then i come back. and i can't find any of my dozens of saved games anymore. nothing. i open the game data directory, look for the saved games, nothing there. i start a new career with a different name to check if i have the right directory, and indeed i see that a new folder pops up. and it's the only folder there.

does this truly mean that i accidentally deleted all my career? all the dozens of saved games that i specifically made as multiple backups, all the ships i ever crafter and saved, hundreds of hours of gameplay, everythingis beyond recovery? please tell me there is still hope

[Jose Tortola]

I guess those deleted files are not in the recycle bin.

Do you have some kind of backup in your PC?.

If you are playing on Steam, maybe cloud savefiles can have still a copy. If you haven't closed KSP yet, just umplug your Internet cable, delete all your savedgames folder (or better cut them to another backup folder), hard-close KSP and Steam, connect again to Internet and try to open Steam and KSP... maybe you're lucky enough to see a promt message telling you that your saved data in your PC doesn't match the cloud's saved data and you can revert it from the cloud.

I'm sorry this happened to you and I hope there's a way to have your game back, but thank you very much for sharing it, this is a heads-up call for every one of us.

[AHHans]

17 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

does this truly mean that i accidentally deleted all my career? all the dozens of saved games that i specifically made as multiple backups, all the ships i ever crafter and saved, hundreds of hours of gameplay, everythingis beyond recovery? please tell me there is still hope

I'm sorry, but from what I can tell the game really deleted everything that was in the directory. So it looks like there is nothing from the game side that you can do to get it back.

Do you have a backup of the KSP installation of the saves folder somewhere? Or do you use steam with the cloud-sync?

P.S. I'm really sorry! It may not be as bad as loosing a PhD thesis after three years of work, but it sill hurts.

[Jurassic kerbal]

38 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

i decided to try running sandbox to see how it looks with the parts i'm still missing.

so i went to create new game, and i didn't bother to change the default name. it asked me if i wanted to overwrite the save, and i said ok, because i wasn't even using the default save, i keep lots of saved games anyway.

so i check what i wanted to check, then i come back. and i can't find any of my dozens of saved games anymore. nothing. i open the game data directory, look for the saved games, nothing there. i start a new career with a different name to check if i have the right directory, and indeed i see that a new folder pops up. and it's the only folder there.

does this truly mean that i accidentally deleted all my career? all the dozens of saved games that i specifically made as multiple backups, all the ships i ever crafter and saved, hundreds of hours of gameplay, everythingis beyond recovery? please tell me there is still hope

Yes it does I have done the same thing so many times

[king of nowhere]

14 minutes ago, AHHans said:

Do you have a backup of the KSP installation of the saves folder somewhere? Or do you use steam with the cloud-sync?

 

nope and nope.

i am old school. i come from the times when each saved game was a backup of its own, so saving the game multiple times was safe. now that i think about it, the far cry games also work in the same way, and i always thought it a terribly stupid way to manage saves.

but i'm thinking: the folder got overwritten, but the files in it were not. so the individual files must still be somewhere in my hard disk, and it should be possible to recover them using some specialized program. i will ask some of the pc experts i know

[Spricigo]

29 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

but i'm thinking: the folder got overwritten, but the files in it were not. so the individual files must still be somewhere in my hard disk, and it should be possible to recover them using some specialized program. i will ask some of the pc experts i know

well, in the game directory you will find a folder named (maybe you guessed) [Saves] and in it the [default] subfolder, if any saved game survived, that is a .sfs file there or in the [backup] sub subfolder and in [Ships/SPH] and [Ships/VAB] sub subfolder  you should look for .craft files. This assuming you don't have any mod that manages your craft files (CraftManager, ShipSaveSplicer, SomeOtheIAmUnawareOf ) which seem to not be the case but you my consider as a way to avoid It happening again.

You may look at KerbalX.com or the The Spacecraft Exchange subform for some low tech craft to speed up the restarting but it seems to not be the most common thing in both places. Granted you don't need to download the "Reliant/Swivel and a bunch of tanks below a pod, science  and decoupler" but I was a bit annoyed when someone pointed that my low tech science  plane requires an 90science node instead of only 45 and lower (shame on me!!).

 

 

[AHHans]

10 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

but i'm thinking: the folder got overwritten, but the files in it were not. so the individual files must still be somewhere in my hard disk, and it should be possible to recover them using some specialized program. i will ask some of the pc experts i know

Yes, a classical "undelete" has a good chance of working. Two comments:

• Everything that writes to the partition that your KSP directory is on may overwrite the deleted files, so try to use that partition as little as possible. If possible unmount the partition, or mount it read-only. (Yes, I'm a Linux person. I can't help you there if you use Windows.) If it is on your main (system) partition, then use the computer as little as possible.
• All the KSP save files (the savegames and the craft files) are pure text files. So you can view them in a text editor to see if you got the right file. You'll only need the *.sfs files (for your savegames) and the *.craft files.

[king of nowhere]

just tried it, it only recovered some fragments, none usable.

i will not rant about the stupidity of a system that overwrites all of my backups like that