Save files from 1.3 gone without warning

A friend of mine had both a singleplayer file and a multiplayer file on the 1.3 patch, both of which he played roughly 4 days ago. Yesterday, when we went to play on the multiplayer farm, we found that it did not exist, and that his personal file had been deleted as well. Looking through the %APPDATA% save folder did not produce any results, meaning the files have completely disappeared. We know that he is still in the beta as we are still able to create new Co-op farms and the game lists itself as in beta on Steam.

Any help figuring out what happened to these files would be great, and while we would love to get them back (we really min-maxed our farm for many hours), even just knowing what went wrong would help a lot for future playthroughs.

 

Do you have steam cloud activated for Stardew Valley? Are your accounts still in the beta?

 

Yes, the accounts are without a doubt still in the beta. We are able to create new Co-op farms and Steam lists the game as [beta] in the library. Steam cloud is active as well.

 

Hmm this is the first time this is reported to us. %APPDATA%\StardewValley does not include a save folder?

 

A save folder exists, but there is absolutely nothing inside of it. On my computer, %APPDATA%/StardewValley has a save folder, and within that folder are my files ([farmername]_123124124 and stuff). Within his save folder, there is nothing, even though we definitely had a couple files a few days ago.

 

The farm is only saved on the hosts computer. Did you host in the past?

 

I need to redact one of my previous statements - apparently, my friend (the host) does NOT have Steam Cloud active. What will this change?

Also, I have never hosted a farm. All of my save games are of solo files.

 

Well so there is no possibility to get those save files out of the cloud... Hmm...

 

Stardew Valley does not erase save files on its own so it might be more of an OS problem.

 

Hmm, alright. Guess the support on the forum can't be of much use if the problem is with the OS, although I'm not sure why that would be the case. Thanks for your help - is there any place you could start us off looking, so we have some general direction? As it is, we don't really know where to start.

 

Phew. Depends on what OS is used... Administrative issues shouldn't be a problem since it's the users roaming folder. Cleanup tools shouldn't touch it cause it isn't a temp folder/file. To be honest - I'm kinda clueless right now. The only information we got is that all the files are gone. And without an error log or any further information I don't know any solution.

 

I don't suppose there is any information I could get for you that would help with troubleshooting? As far as we're aware, the files were all present on Friday and just - weren't - yesterday. I wish I could provide more on that front, but as far as either of us know, that's all that happened. I'll be hosting farms for us in the future, but to make sure this doesn't happen again or get some grasp on the situation, please let me know if there's any info that would help you diagnose the problem.

 

Hi Keru, sorry for the continued messaging, but it seems that I was wrong AGAIN - my friend did not know what Steam Cloud was, and after I led him to it, it turns out it's been on this whole time. Is there any chance we could recover the files from that?

 

Well here you are with the usual "How do I protect my save files" tips =/ - Enable steam cloud and do regular save game backups... I hope this will be our/your last case of a lost save file/folder. And i'm afraid there won't be any further usable data without the right logging tools enabled.

 

Let me turn off my music for that one and let me have a look ^^

 

Really sorry about that misunderstanding - my friend uses Steam rarely and had no idea that was a function. I've been looking into the protocol for extracting files from Steam Cloud, but I wanted to know if there's anything specific I should be looking for in regards to Stardew.

 

There is an upload/download log / config file in "C:\programs\Steam\userdata\*STEAMID*\413150\
The save files should be in there as well...

 

Ok, so both of us only have a remotecache.vdf file in that folder. This isn't a problem for me, as I have all my savegames elsewhere, but it is an issue for my friend. No save games as far as we can see.