Cities missing, please help

[keving2 0]

I am an old age pensioner who has been playing SimCity 4 Deluxe, the game I have been building for 2 years simply disapeared off my computer yesterday.

I have tried to contact Steam Support but they can't help me get my game back, can someone help. If any of you have spent 2 years building multiple cities you will know how upset I am to lose it all. All I need is some one to help me get my game back and or tell me who to contact, I have tried Steam but all I got was gobbbly gook instructions which did not work.

Can someone please help me, this is way to complicated for me. I paid for a game I cant use.

[rsc204 21,806]

@keving2: Hello, don't despair you have found the real experts and it's not Steam who only sell games or EA who made SimCity, rather a community of dedicated folks who love the game and we're here to help.

So a few points of order first, please do not post your phone number, e-mail address or ideally any personally identifying information, primarily this is for your own safety. However we will proactively remove such if someone does post it, as I have done here. Likewise I moved your post to a better place and have tweaked it a bit, I hope you understand.

With that out of the way, we need to start with some basics, can you offer any further information on the problem, specifically anything unusual that may have happened before the problem appeared? For example have you had to re-install SimCity 4 recently for any reason?

Additionally the regions in question, were they created using the regions that ship with the game or have you been using custom downloaded maps/regions at all?

Ultimately if you didn't delete the save data somehow and/or no faults have occurred, there is a very good chance the files you need still exist and things just need to be put back properly, but this isn't necessarily easy to go through step by step.

Before you do anything else, you want to make a backup of all the data involved here, that way no matter what happens from here, you have a copy that you can return to later if need be. To do that is pretty simple, hopefully you have a USB Stick or some external (not built in) storage you can make use of for this? The steps are as follows:

1. Locate the SimCity 4 folder, which you can find under Documents in Windows and open it.
2. Amongst the entries here should be a folder named Regions. You can copy it by right clicking upon it and selecting Copy from the list that appears.
3. Now open your external drive (or you can use an internal drive if you must), right click an empty space there and select Paste. A copy of the Regions folder will now be made on the device you used. Once it finishes copying (may take a little while), safely remove (eject) the device and put it away. If everything works, great you won't need it, but in case of problems, it's best left untouched in the interim.