Power outage destroyed my campaign...

[Asgurgolas]

Alright, here I am again. I just suffered a bad case of power outage while I was on FG, helping a player make a new character. As I turned on my pc back again and reloaded FG, I opened the campaign and... zero. It's still there, but I have no more story, notes, written NPCs, spells, calendar, even characters. It all disappeared. I tried re-setting a db.xml from a backup and it still doesn't recover.
When I recover with a db.xml, it gives me this error:

28674

Help Q_Q (that's 4 years of data entry and working and creating, and the power outage came right as I was updating the backup.. the previous one I could use is from around 1 year ago Q_Q)

And of course, session is due in 3 days :F

[Zacchaeus]

First of all make a copy of the whole campaign folder. Then rename the original db.xml file to something like dbold or dbdead or whatever. Then find the latest or largest session file in the folder and rename that to db.xml. Start up your campaign again. If that isn't any use then go to the next latest or biggest until you find one with the bulk of your data.

[Asgurgolas]

I did it, but characters, notes, calendar info, NPCs, spells, feats, classes... everything I wrote so far still went POOF :s

[Zacchaeus]

So all of the session files are the same? None of them include any of your data?

[ddavison]

There should be a large history of db.backup.somenumber.xml files in your campaign folder. Unless you deleted those, they should include the versions of the campaign at the conclusion of each session.

For the first step, make a backup of those files that you store somewhere else. Next, look at the file size and even open them up and view them in a web browser if you want to see what sort of content is included.

Close Fantasy Grounds
Rename db.xml to db.bad.xml
Copy db.backup.1566923698.xml and then rename it to db.xml
Load up FG and the campaign and see if your stuff is back
If not, then repeat those steps with the next most recent xml file.


If you have extensions for known types disabled in your File Browser, make sure you turn that on so that you can be certain that you are just naming the file as db.xml and not db.xml.xml or something like that.

[LordEntrails]

May I also suggest you make regular backups of your computer or at least anything that is of importance to you? There is a script on the forums if you need help doing something like that for your FG Data.

[Asgurgolas]

I found a backup I totally forgot I had. Thing is, the power outage (somehow) did wreack havoc to some folder, deleting basically every file there was. I recovered those files from an older backup I had elsewhere so I'm only "missing out" on 3-4 months of data entry e bookkeeping... still better than starting from scratch I'd say (Still I wonder why it happened).
Also, if I try to restore ANY backup (from the installation folder) later than that one, it STILL opens up that error and empties everything again (i tried re-setting the db.backup from last session, last saturday)

[damned]

please post a screenshot of the campaign directory.
also dont rename backup files, make a copy of the backup file and rename the copy as db.xml.

[Asgurgolas]

I managed to recover much of it in the end but still can't reuse any db later than that one u.u