DB Corrupt

[NerdomatickOne]

I just ran my first session with FG tonight. All my players made characters, I wrote some notes, created parcels, made adjustments, had a battle map with tons of tokens. I saved in the chat just to be safe. Ten minutes after shutting down I went back to review something. It informed me that my database was possibly corrupt. Sure enough, it had reverted to some older state from a couple days ago when the adventure was being set up. All of the characters and changes are gone. I looked at the backup DB's but they're all old and don't have any of the newer data. About 7 hours of prep work and an hour of character creation are lost.

Now for the questions. Is there some other backup I'm not seeing? Are Characters only stored in the local DB? How could this have happen and be prevented in the future?

It was already hard enough convincing my players to make the switch from Roll20; this seems like a huge setback. Thanks.

[damned]

Hey NerdomatickOne there is usually only the one backup instance that FG creates and it looks like that is what has restored.

What I usually do is make a backup before or after each session/prep. I zip up the folder and give it a DateStamp eg 20160118.LMoP.zip and I copy those into my OneDrive.

As to what caused it - I dont know - are you on a PC or Mac? Macs it seems you should use the right click and Exit to be safe. I have had very very few crashes of my DB in almost 5years. The most common cause of DB crash for me is when I open another copy of FG and launch the same campaign (I do a lot of testing and I do this sometimes accidentally) - this usually causes a crash.

How can we salvage something?
Ask your players to launch FG (do not Join Game) and go to Manage Charcaters. They should be able to select the campaign and then export their characters to XML and email them to you and you can Import them.
For your campaign data - if you dont have a backup you are probably out of luck. Have a look in the Fantasy Grounds\Campaigns\<campaign name> folder for any db.**** files - its *possible* there might be something there.

[Moon Wizard]

Also, please ensure that your FG data directory is not specified in a location where file backup or synchronization is occurring (such as DropBox or OneDrive). We have heard reports that these services will sometimes corrupt the data, though we have not been able to determine the trigger for this issue yet.

Regards,
JPG

[NerdomatickOne]

Thanks damned and Moon Wizard. Thanks for the quick and thorough response. I'm on a PC and will start to back up the campaign folders. I did search for other db files and they don't seem to have any current data after looking through the XML. As to the characters i'll check with my players when they available. Thanks again!

[Griogre]

It could also be a problem with folder permissions, though it is strange that you have a partial back up in that case.