Lost all my notes and characters

[mysterowl]

So I went to open FG tonight for my session and it appears that my session only partially exists now. All my PC's are gone, all my notes are gone and when my players try to connect they can see nothing. I went through and tried to restore a previous session (by renaming a backup db.xml) with the same results. Any ideas what might be going on?

[Zacchaeus]

In the same place you found the backup file you should see a number of other files called db.session.xxxxxxxxx.xml. These are session backups of your campaign. First make a back up of the entire campaign folder and then rename the db.xml file to something like dbold.xml or whatever. Then look for the session file with the most recent date or largest file size and rename it to db.xml and then start FG. If the first one doesn't have everything try the next one. You may find that there is still some stuff missing but you should be able to recover most of it.

[mysterowl]

Thanks for the reply. I've gone back to every session for the last five months and it's still the same results. All the players still say they see the active quests and all the images and hot keys, but not their character sheets and notes. The party tab and combat tracker is also empty.

[Trenloe]

Please post the latest session xml file you have her so we can check it.

[mysterowl]

Here it is. Thank you so much.

[Trenloe]

Here it is. Thank you so much.
Thanks for posting. That file looks about the right size, but is full of NULL characters, which isn't correct.

What operating system are you running on? Can you open any of the .xml files in a text editor and see structured XML?

[mysterowl]

Windows 10 and yes, I can view in a text editor.

[mysterowl]

Looking through the xml I can see a bunch of my character data, including their names and what looks like their inventories etc...don't know if that helps or not.

[Trenloe]

Looking at the file you attached - it has two .xml file extensions (.xml.xml) - in Windows file explorer check that you have "File name extensions" enabled in the "View" tab - and then make sure that the file you're renaming to db.xml are actually db.xml and not db.xml.xml (when View -> "File name extensions" is enabled).

[mysterowl]

That totally did the trick. User error on the naming of the files. Thank you so much for taking the time to help and I'm proud to back such a great company in our endeavors. Can't wait for Unity!

[Trenloe]

That totally did the trick.
Fantastic! So pleased you could recover some of your data. :)

[damned]

Please dont rename the backups as db.xml
Make a copy of the backup and rename the copy as db.xml
If something on your system is crashing/corrupting the db.xml you dont want to nuke all your backups before you resolve the issue

[Nylanfs]

Also make sure you aren't pointing your live data folder ay a synced folder location like OneDrive or Drive, or Dropbox. You can manually copy the campaign data back and forth into a synced location. But your actual campaign folder needs to be somewhere else.