Completely destroyed database

[gjtbackwards]

I just started the 2038 season with my team earlier today, but after exiting the game properly this afternoon and reloading my franchise this evening everything is completely messed up.

The colour scheme has changed from my team colours (Jays) to a weird mix of yellow and green, all my staff positions have been vacated, the standings aren't loading on the Manager's Office page, and despite players having the proper stats for this point in the season, teams records all reverted back to 0-0 like the season hadn't started yet.

I fear that I've lost my franchise (17+ seasons) and now have to completely start over again.

Is there any way to recover an older save point so I haven't lost everything????

[Lukas Berger]

This sounds like a corrupt league file.

In that case, you may be able to restore from the autosave function. Instructions on doing that follow:

To restore from the automatic backup, do the following:

1) Open the game and on the start screen, click on Settings

2) Now click on the tab "Troubleshooting".

3) Click "Open folder containing saved games".

4) Now open up the league folder you're wanting to restore.

5) Then select all of the .dat files in the folder and back them up (just in case) by copying them to a temporary folder or creating a zipped file with them

6) Open the folder called "auto-save".

7) In there, select all of the ".dat" files and copy them to the league folder (the parent of the current folder) overwriting all of the ".dat" files in the league folder.

8) Now start the game and load your league.

[Lukas Berger]

For future reference, there are a few things that can cause corruption. This potentially includes unexpected system shutdowns or crashes especially while a league is saving, bad sectors on the hard drive the game is saved to, memory glitches on your computer (especially possible if the league is left open for very long periods of time without the game being shut down or restarted) or occasionally interference from other programs.

Some of what you might do to prevent that from coming up again would be to regularly defrag your hard drive as well as check it for errors, make sure to occasionally shut your computer off or at least restart it and also run as few other programs in the background at the same time as OOTP as possible.

For programs that need to be running at the same time, like an anti-virus or firewall, it's a good idea to add OOTP to their whitelist and exclude OOTP and its data folders from any disk cleaners or similar programs. This is a pretty important step, as it's probably where 95% of the issues with league corruption come from. Basically, any programs that can change or delete files on their own, without asking you about it, you'll want to have them steer clear of any OOTP files and folders.

[gjtbackwards]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

This sounds like a corrupt league file.

In that case, you may be able to restore from the autosave function. Instructions on doing that follow:

Unfortunately, the auto-save folder contained the exact same .dat files as the root directory, so this didn't solve the issue.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by gjtbackwards

Unfortunately, the auto-save folder contained the exact same .dat files as the root directory, so this didn't solve the issue.

Thanks for the suggestions.

That's odd Did you actually try switching them to replace the others?

They will be named the same of course, but they shouldn't have exactly the same data.

Of course, it some circumstances it's possible they may be corrupt as well.

[gjtbackwards]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

That's odd Did you actually try switching them to replace the others?

They will be named the same of course, but they shouldn't have exactly the same data.

Of course, it some circumstances it's possible they may be corrupt as well.

They were the exact same file sizes, but I went through the process anyhow.

I zipped up the original files and placed them in a temp folder, then took all the files from the auto-save folder and dropped them into the root directly. When I booted up the game I had the exact same issues.

My auto-save setting is once per year, so I have no idea how both the root directory files and the auto-save got corrupted identically.

The only step I haven't taken is to delete the game and re-install. Maybe that'll fix something.

I am waiting to here back from the service ticket I opened, as well as feedback on the files I uploaded to the FTP server.