Good evening/morning,
I am sure to back up my game using SimPE frequently, Even so, I appear to have encountered a peculiar glitch when reverting to previous saves. Practices aside, I backed up my primary neighborhood in Simpe, yet realized that a glitch had occurred, and therefore opted to roll back to a previous save. In the aforementioned latest save ( Not the previous one), I had created a sim with ties to my current playable sims. However, upon reverting back to the old save prior to the "current" one, the sim made in the "latest" one still existed, only without a residence, or ties to playable sims, yet with all traits and memories intact. In addition, the sim was NOT in the simbin, and was retrieved via simblender. Why would this sim exist? Hoodchecker reads no signs of corruption, and I was sure that the save did not contain the sim. Also, why didn't he have a house? I highly doubt a mod conflict is to blame, or any negligence on my part, although I can never be ABSOLUTELY sure...I have also cleared my cache.
Thanks in advance for all answers, and I hope my question was at least comprehendible enough to form a logical conclusion...

How do you backup hoods with SimPE? If I were to backup my hood, I’d just pack its folder (e.g. N001 for Pleasantview) into an archive. If you did all those things you said by modifying the hood file only (e.g. N001_Neighborhood.package), it’s not surprising that the sim exists – their character file is in the N00X/Characters folder.

I would always back up manually not with simpe.

Are you restoring using SimPE? I'm wondering if there is an issue with it not replacing the neighbourhoods.package. What you might try is restoring again to the earlier save (though tbh, it's probably just as well to copy the folder over to the neighbourhoods folder instead) and then try deleting the neighbourhoods.package.

I'm wondering if your restore just copied the backup files over the current files, instead of deleting the current files first. That way you'd still have the new character file.

I backup both manually and with simpe, and I have three manual backup versions. But usually, when I backup with Simpe, they no longer exist ( the sims). It might make sense that the SimPE not completely erase the sim, although I assumed it did.

When I backup manually I need to rename folder, otherwise my PC don't let me save folder with a same name (is asking overwrite or not save at all). I usually add date after The Sims 2.

When SimPE backs up, what it does is make a copy of the folder and sticks it somewhere in My Documets (can't remember exactly where now). In other words, it does exactly the same thing as you do when you do it manually. I don't know how it does restores though. I can't imagine it would be set up to be daft enough to overwrite something already there though.

Does this mean that the backup hadn't correctly done away with the sims?

I said I didn't know how it did backups - I might test it actually.

Are you using the backup feature in SimPE in the Neighborhood Browser window? That one just backs up the Nxxx_Neighborhood.package file, so is not a full backup. Restoring that could cause the glitches you mention.

Yes that is what I used. I have just found the sim in-game, although I recall not having made him yet in that save.. So probably a SimPE glitch...

Thank you all for your great help!

So if SimPE only copies the neighborhood.package, the obvious question is, does restoring a backup cause corruption? Usually the issues with deleting a sim come from the unattached relationships, wants, etc flying around and attaching themselves to random sims, but those are all saved inside the neighborhood file, which was replaced. The only thing that remains is the character file.

Obviously it's less than ideal, but is it actually dangerous?

But it doesn't just copy the neighbourhood.package - attached pictures showing it working on my machine. What the backup facility does is create a folder beside your Sims 2 folder then, as you can see in the pictures, once you go in, the neighbourhood back up is labelled with a date and there's a full set of folders and files inside that.


This I don't know - I'm going to try and test it.

But that's the exact same thing as copying the folder manually. So we're back to square one, how did Emperor Crat's bug happen? Maybe some hickup during the backup restoration?

At least that means that SimPE backups are normally safe to use.

Yes, which is exactly what I said upthread. I'm still to make the test though - I'm afraid I found something more interesting to do.