I deleted my city by accident... HELP

[thegrindre 28]

Is there anyway to retrieve a deleted city???

I've searched all the folders for the SAVE folder but haven't found one.

 

Thanks,

[Mister Giggles 310]

Yes, technically. It depends on how you deleted it. If you deleted your city's data from the save folder yourself, it's in the Recycle Bin and is easily recoverable as long as you don't empty it.

 

If you deleted it from within SimCity 4, using its delete city function, or you emptied your Recycle Bin, it's slightly more difficult. In this case, the operating system was told to wipe out the information associated with your city's data in the Master Boot Record. The city's data is still on your hard drive, but the space it's taking up is considered empty and will be overwritten by future disk write operations. The more disk write operations that take place between now and recovering the city's data, the more likely it is the city's data will be permanently damaged.

 

It's not the end if you're willing to spend quite a bit of time and/or money. There are programs, called disk recovery software, that are able to find and restore files that have been deleted. Most of them are not free or have very limited capabilities as a free trial. You'll want to begin your research at Wikipedia, as it contains much basic information and links to sources, and expand from there.

 

I suppose whether or not it's worth the effort depends on the emotional ties you have to the city. Having personally wiped out a city I invested hundreds of hours into, I see the temptation to go whole hog on this venture.

[thegrindre 28]

Thank you, sir. It's not that impotent to me. I can let it go. I really wanted to start over again anyway.

I have no recycle bin so it's long gone.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

If you have the file system journal turned on, you might be able to get a version from the file system, but if it has been gone since before your last backup it may indeed be gone forever.

[Mister Giggles 310]

Ah, yes. System Restore (The Windows name) might have a backup. I would not know for sure, as it's one of the first things I turn off on an install. <_<

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Microsoft does try to clutter up your system just in case you really goof, but they really don't tell you much about it.  When I was running windows, I turned off about half the stuff they thought should be default.

[rsc204 21,866]

System restore does not cover your personal data, it only recovers the system to a previous point in time in respect of critical Windows files like the registry. With Windows 7 I've salvaged a messed up install or even problems with malware utilising it.

 

You can argue about turning off the fluff in Windows, but the fact remains that most users don't know or want to know how an operating system works, they just want the tools a computer provides. Such fail safes are actually a very good thing for the masses, the computer equivalent of Automatic Braking or ABS, it's simply there to get you out of trouble where possible.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Yes.  Computers are just home appliances now.  Most users don't even know how to look for a file.

[thegrindre 28]

I've been fooling around with computers since 1988 and learned BASIC language back then. Coming from DOS makes me simplify my PC. Ater a complete reinstall of Win XP Pro, It takes me hours to tweak the thing back to a basic simple working system again. LOL I toss out all the 'bells & whistles' I know of. Sheesh!

 

Thanks guys,

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, I saw my first computer in 1962, and wrote some basic applications that you can now buy off the shelf from many vendors.  In my day there were no app stores, and there were no microcomputers either.  I worked for one of the seven dwarfs (remember them?) who competed with Snow White and managed to make a living at it until the age of the PC put paid to the general computer game.

 

If you really loved the good old days, why are you not running CPM?

[thegrindre 28]

I've gotten lazy is about all I can say. Windows 3.1 knocked me out of programing anything anymore. Soon after 3.1, I found everything on the 'net' and it was free. Why waste my time anymore?

So all I did was move on into the modern day PC with Win XP Pro.

[ZeusAV 20]

Not much you can do now but after my Windows laptop overheating and freezing up during a save back in 2005, which eventually lead to my largest city at that time being ruined, here's what I do:

 

- I have an external hard drive that I occasionally (once a month), copy my entire Sim City 4 folder to for backup purposes.

- Have an Apple Time Capsule that does full backups Time Machine backups of my computer every hour or so, making it so that any file corruption or mistakenly deleted file can be recovered easily.  I think this one only works for Macs though there might be a similar solution for Windows machines.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

I believe Windows now has a similar journalling mechanism if you turn it on.  I use Ubuntu, and I have an automatic backup the writes incremental changes on an external hard drive every Thursday at midnight.  I have a second, usually offline, HDD that I use for serious backups once in a while when I get to some point I really want to keep.  I write a fresh tarball out there as needed.

[crishy 57]

It is wise to backup your regions once in a while, not only to prevent mishaps like this, but also bugs that render any specific city unplayable. It happened once to me that I plopped a glitched building that happened to cause a CTD upon putting the game on play mode, and because I already saved the city previously to activating the simulator, it always caused a CTD again upon reloading the city. Somehow it did not crash the game when I plopped it in the first place, and before I ran the simulation, but that can happen. Thankfully I had a backup of the region, the city itself had extensive modifications that were lost but at least I did not had to restart from scratch there.

 

Also, because of this incident, I never ever save the game after doing any sort of modifications, no matter how slight, before running the simulation for a while, to ensure this does not happen, lol.

 

But I feel for you. I once lost a region when transferring stuff from an older computer to a newer one. Somehow that region was lost during the transition.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

<snip>

 

But I feel for you. I once lost a region when transferring stuff from an older computer to a newer one. Somehow that region was lost during the transition.

Since a region is nothing but a set of data files, how did you manage to lose it?

[crishy 57]

 

<snip>

 

But I feel for you. I once lost a region when transferring stuff from an older computer to a newer one. Somehow that region was lost during the transition.

Since a region is nothing but a set of data files, how did you manage to lose it?

 

 

It was a fairly long time ago, so I do not remember. I believe that I went inside the Region folder and just cut and pasted specifically the regions (and not the entire folder itself) that I thought were the ones I was playing on, and overlooked one of them.

[Ltw 401]

Personally I've had some successes with EaseUS. I haven't lost any cities (yet) but I've successfully recovered some other files. You have a 2GB limit with the free version but I guess that should be enough.

Good luck!