SimCity 4 - restore previous save

[ana815 5]

Hello, how do i restore a previous saved city? I saved my game by mistake when i exited game and now i got my city ruined. Ive been building it for more than a year now because i don't play too often.

Help please

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

Depending on your version of Windoze (I know it's an option in 7 Pro), you can use File Explorer to find the .sc4 file, right click, and select Restore previous versions. However, that will be from whenever the last time a System Restore was created. By default this option is turned on.

[ana815 5]

9 minutes ago, CorinaMarie said:

Depending on your version of Windoze (I know it's an option in 7 Pro), you can use File Explorer to find the .sc4 file, right click, and select Restore previous versions. However, that will be from whenever the last time a System Restore was created. By default this option is turned on.

i did try it but it says  "there are no previous versions available"

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

Well, phooey. The only other option is to copy if from a backup folder or flash drive if you have previously saved it somewhere. (You do make backups, right?)

[ana815 5]

Yes i do have a backup but i've made some progress and the backup file is a bit old. 

[CorinaMarie 29,568]

How badly messed up is the current save? I guess you have to decide if it would be more work to fix it or to rebuild from the old backup copy.

[ana815 5]

Yep i think i'll rebuild it. population is back to 0 and everything is abbandoned. I guess i will have to find each building and plop it again on the same spot and rezone the residencial and comercial areas (ony very recently i started populating the city). 

For me it would be harder to make the sea front and road system again. Plus i'd have to spent too much time deciding wich building would be the best for each area again.

[twalsh102 1,601]

Another lesson learned (hopefully), unfortunately learned the hard way:  backups don't really do you any good unless they are reasonably current.

SC4 unfortunately provides no way to save multiple iterations of a city savegame file.  When you hit save, the game merely overwrites the previous savegame file.  There is no way to revert to a previous version of the file within the game.  So to actually have a backup, it must be done manually (outside the game). 

Here's a recommendation:  Install Karen's Replicator (https://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator).  I was turned onto this program through one of @CorinaMarie's posts a while back, and it functions very well for me.  You have numerous options to run backup jobs either manually, or on a schedule.  You can schedule jobs to run as frequently as every minute, or as infrequently as every 12 months.  One of the features that is probably the most useful as far as saving savegame files is that you can setup the software to append the date to the destination folder name as part of the backup job.  Setup jobs to save individual regions, or setup a job to save your entire Regions folder.  I primarily use the program to backup my Plugins folder , and its various permutations.

There are a couple of caveats for this software: 1) it is quite old; it was last updated in 2009 because Karen passed away in 2011; 2) there have been reports of Karen's Replicator not playing well with Windows 10; however recent information on the website (as of Dec. 2017) indicates that making sure Windows 10 is completely up to date has resolved these issues.  The good news is that the website is being maintained by others that worked with Karen, support is still available, and supposedly work is being done to update all of Karen's Power Tools.    Of course the best news is that the software is free.

[jeffryfisher 2,176]

4 hours ago, ana815 said:

i got my city ruined.

Describe "ruined". Depending on what form of ruin you suffered, some of us may know how to repair it. For instance, the most common symptom of save & exit is that the city looks empty in the region-view. That's just the region-view, and it's recoverable. There are also some cheats that can aid some repairs.

OTOH, If you scraped the city in order to measure something and then accidentally saved it that way, then it's hosed.

So what kind of ruined are you up against?