Data recovery... help?!

[Lorddamax]

I spent well over 100 hours creating a custom ruleset.

For some reason which I now utterly abhor, FG stores its data in Application Data - an area NO other software program I've ever seen stores important/critical/vital data.

A while back windows crashed and I needed to reinstall. All my data was preserved. My documents, my music, everything in pogram files... but since it was a new version of windows I got a whole new application data folder.

Color me infuriated when I fired up FGII today to continue the campaign I havent run in 6 months, to find the entire thing GONE! I check my carbonie backup - yeah, that doesnt back up AppData either, because NO ONE stores critical data in there!

Yes, I've scanned the drive for the files, they are gone.

Now here's my question - I havent heard back from all my players yet, but I connected to my DM machine from my work PC a few times as I was developing the ruleset. I have some files from it, one of which is campaign.dat which is 10 megs - thats a lot of stuff. But I've no idea WHAT the file is. I was hoping it was a renamed zip file that had the custom character sheet, the maps, etc in it. No dice.

So what is campaign.dat?

Any thoughts on recovery of the ruleset/campaign from the client PCs that I'm praying to god have their AppData folder intact?

[Griogre]

The campaign.dat file is FG’s cache file for that campaign. I have grave doubts you will be able to recover anything from the file because I believe it is encrypted.

I’m sorry you got burned on the data apps thing. :( More and more programs are going to be using it in the future though to be Vista compliant. It’s been in the Window’s Guidelines since Win2000 but Vista was the first OS to actually crack down on preventing read/writes to the program files directory. Those read/writes are now thrown on the virtual store and because programmers don’t like to look like amateurs, new programs will be the using data apps folders to avoid having stuff get thrown on the virtual store.

[Dogzilla]

I had the same thing happen to me and I used a data recovery tool. Unfortunately what files I could recover were garbled and full of errors...
Sorry I cant give you a solution, but at least I can reassure you that it has happened to someone else.

- Dog