Lost data. Can I get it from the Clients?

[CB Droege]

Through my own stupid fault, I lost all of the information on the drive that FGII was installed on, and the drive that I was backing-up my campaign onto. My most recent off-system back-up was in June, so I'm looking at having to recreate a lot of NPCs, items, locale descriptions, and so-forth. I've had to tell my players that the game is on hold until I can find the time to recreate all of this information. I already tried Recuva and GetDataBack to find the db.xml file, but it's completely lost.

What I want to know is this:

Is the campaign info stored anywhere on the clients' systems, and if so, is there anyway to access it?

One of my players found a file called campaing.dat in his FG directory. It's about 100MB, but the information inside is in a binary format. Is that where the client version of the info is stored?

If nothing else, are their character sheets at least stored somewhere on their systems?

[Griogre]

Sadly, the player dat files are not going to help you, the GM. They are cache files. However, if you are last played using a fairly recent version of FG then your Players can still look at their characters.

Have them start FG and then click the Manage Characters button. In the lower pane is a list of campaigns. If they go to your campaign they can open their character(s). These characters are static but the information can be copied down so it can be re-input once you put your campaign back togeather.

[CB Droege]

If that works, it'll be a big help. Trying to recreate the last few levels of PC development was the part I was looking forward to the least. The characters would never be the same again.

I'll have my players try this, and see what they can get.

[Moon Wizard]

Actually, I just figured out that the campaign.dat files are actually PAK files. By renaming the file and using the PAK entraction tool, you can see a set of XML files on the client that appear to contain the character information. I'm not sure if you can cut and paste this information back into an empty campaign db.xml or not. It might be worth a try, if you are comfortable with XML.

Cheers,
JPG

[Foen]

Actually, I just figured out that the campaign.dat files are actually PAK files. By renaming the file and using the PAK entraction tool, you can see a set of XML files on the client that appear to contain the character information.

Good spot, JPG!

Stuart

[Zeus]

If the XML representation of a character in the cache PAK is different to that of the typical representation of a character within a campaign's db.xml, let me know and I may be able to write an XSL transformation stylesheet for you that can handle the conversion.

[CB Droege]

Sorry, forgot to drop an update after trying this.

The players were able to find the most recent version of their characters just the way Griogre said, so I had them take screen shots of their character sheets and send them to me. It took some time to transcribe, but at lewast it wasn't lost. I stil had to recreate a lot of campaign stuff, but loosing the characters would have likely meant the end of the campaign, so I'm really glad this worked.