I was in the process of reinstalling Sims 2, when everything seemed alright.
I installed all the games I had when I made my last backup, and I patched the game and expansions as I went.
I had Sims 2, University, Nightlife, Open for Business, Seasons and Family Fun Stuff when I last made a backup. Those are what I installed and patched first.
Then I installed my backup data (the Neighborhoods folder).
I left out the Download folder.
I used Riverblossom Hills as the location to 'test play' the game, I toyed around with O'Macky (sp? the single 'dread pirate' gal, not the couple with her ex in it) for a little bit and saw nothing wrong. (now thinking I didn't play enough)
I got Pets installed and patched, played it a little bit (using the one guy with the dog in the family bin from Pets), everything seemed alright.
I got Bon Voyage installed, generated the vacation spots, used the Traveller family for a little bit, phone rang, Trisha Traveller answered it and got invited downtown...

Cue twilight zone music, and going head first into a mountain of trouble that got uncovered when a few sims from the backup showed up.
It seemed there was a lot of troubles with sims, mostly ones I recall from before I made my last update earlier this month.

So, I decide to start checking out other families.
The Greenman family and O'Macky (sp? the single gal) was the only ones I checked that seemed okay. Others were not, such as Ramaswami (sp?), Ottomas and a few families I had made that I also checked out while trouble shooting.


The problems so far, leading me to think my backup data has been corrupted or did not get properly installed...

1: All the female sims and all the toddler, child, teenage and elder sims (both genders) from the backup sound like adult male sims, and when it came to using public restrooms, the female sims would use the male restroom, I even saw an adult female sim use a urinal.

2: Most 'data' for the Sims is basically gone. No aspirations (as in NONE, no Knowledge, Family, etc, just an empty spot, no lifetime aspirations or aspiration 'rank'), aspiration bar fully rock bottom (red from 'middle' down), age at adult with 29 days to elder (regardless if sim is toddler, child, teen, adult or already elder) memories all gone, all have personality with 0 in all stats, fitness max (although it is the middle 'figure' highlighted), unemployed, no skills, no badges (even plant sims lack the Gold badge in gardening), inventory empty except a ReNuYu Porta-Chug, relationships wiped/cleared except for sims that are on the same lot and even those are at the bare minimal with stuff like marriage/love gone, Chemistry (turn ons and turn offs) are not what they originally were, but Bio info is actually still there.
Even money was effected, rough guess, it was lopping off everything but the last 2 digits, as the affected families had money in the double digits.
Playing with the Ottomas, which I had played with a while before I had made the backup I am using, I run into the same problems after the backup was restored, the problem manifests even worse, the one stop shop of age groups (from toddler to elder) revealed the severity of the age problem, and far more. The kids are walking in the air (rough guess, their waist basically at waist level of an adult), even the two toddlers, and they seem to walk in air and talk like adults and have adult interactions in the menu.

cue more twilight zone music...

3: I went to Pleasantview, to check some of the sims I used to play a lot before I even had Seasons.
A few community lots I made were there. Sims I had created, and the homes they lived in, were simply gone.

Problems 1&2 apparently exclude those Maxis sims/families that started in a home, and a few Maxis sims from the family bin that were moved in, but others were affected.
It seems that ALL of the sims I made before the backup are effected (except the ones that were gone, house and all, since they were no longer there to be messed up).


The last time I used the backup data, I encountered none of problems 1&2, , although I did have sims and entire families (mainly Maxis sims) or all the sims in entire areas such as the shopping district for Riverblossm Hills, up and vanish without a trace (lots were still there) after first trying to install, patch and play Bon Voyage and Apratment Life a week or two back.



Is my backup data basically corrupted somehow?

Did I possibly mess up something somewhere two have had such major problems after two attempts to install/reinstall?
Have I misread/misunderstood the FAQ's somehow?

Is there any way I can fix the problem?

I don't really mind the loss of relationships, just new goals to work for, but having sims running around with no Aspiration types, no points in personality, etc, really wrecks things, especially the sims I had worked so hard on to create and develop.
Is there any way I can at least 'recover' the sims and get them into a usable form?

Even though I have installed a few newer expansions, is there some way to reload the backup data and not 'overwrite' stuff added by Pets and Bon Voyage?
Or would it be possible/best to simply uninstall Bon Voyage and Pets and then reload the backup data again and trouble shoot from there?

Backups are 'forward' compatible. So backups will work with later EP's..but won't work if you 'removed' an EP that you had installed when you backed up. So, that shouldn't have been a problem.

What exactly did you backup? Did you back up the entire Sims2 folder in mydocs?

The backup was made of just the Neighborhoods (and all its contents) and the Downloads folder from the The Sims 2 folder in My Documents/EA Games.

Unfortunately, the backup was made before I had even been to this part of the site, and before I ever found the FAQs at MTS2 (had no need to look for them before, except maybe 'downloading for frakking dummies').

Due to the previous problems I have had, I would not be surprised if I did mess up something when I made the last backup, or if I am otherwise repeating some sort of mistake when restoring the backup.

A little bit of good news.
I was digging through backup files from the last major backup I did back a few months ago, and I found the entire My Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2 folder and all its contents. It's a bit old (created in January according to file properties), but if all else fails, loosing 'some' data is preferable to loosing 'all' data.

I would still like to get my more recent backup working if at all possible.

Yes! You know, you could try that backup. If it doesn't work, just remove it. Let us know how you get on.

*pats on head for making backups and keeping them* And also..cookies! With frosting and sprinkles.

The older backup was made with the same EPs/SP as the more recent one, so would it work to uninstall Pets and Bon Voyage (the only newer EPs/SPs I got installed so far), since it will delete the entire TS2 folder, and bringing me back down to the same EPs/SP I had when the older backup was made, and then restore the older backup of the entire The Sims 2 folder?
Would I have to re-patch?

Or should I do a full uninstall/reinstall again?
(I hope I don't need to do manual uninstall again)

One side question since I am pulling out the older backup.
I found these sitting my my old TS2 folder backup...
university_rev_a_installer.dmg
nightlife_rev_a_installer.dmg
I have no idea what to do with them then...
Although their descriptions made no such mention (got them from FileFront last year), do I basically got a pair of useless TS2 Mac files sitting on my computer?

The older backup was made during a time my PC was just plain acting very odd, so I basically didn't want to take time looking for saves, and just mass copied entire game folders and the entire My Documents folder to get as much backed up as fast as possible. Which was a good thing, because the computer I had at the time died almost a week afterward (Main HDD stopped working, computer shop doing repairs to it stumbled upon a blown capacitor to boot).
So I have already used the older backup once, mainly due to having to install everything on a new HDD, so it should (still) be good.

Go figure, the backup I make on purpose might be badly done, yet the one made in haste never gave me troubles...

There is one or two more recently made Sims I would like to keep, and...
is it just me, or has the "Extract In-Game Sim" FAQ shrunk a lot?
I had glanced at it when I first had troubles with a problem I listed in a previous thread (about two weeks back, with a sim getting messed up in University), and the FAQ does not seem as big as I remember it...

What exactly did you get from filefront? Are you saying you downloaded the Sims games from filefront?

Seems to me that either you didn't back up your entire Neighborhoods folder or you have some serious file corruption. If you remove your entire Sims 2 folder from My Docs and play the games does all this still happen? If this fixes things, the problem is in your user files and the backup you made is probably useless. If it still happens then maybe your game didn't install right and you have to try again.

Yes, exactly -- those are the OSX patches for Uni and NL (the exact same files that are available from Aspyr, here and here – nothing questionable =). You can safely throw them away; the latest OSX patch (Dec 2007 Combo) includes these anyway.

Thanks for the info on the .dmg files.
I guess I have no use for OSX stuff since I run Windows XP with the PC version of TS2




I was doing some additional troubleshooting, playing different sims in different areas, looking for other problems, etc.

• Riverblossom Hills has sims generally messed up as I have mentioned so far, even in the connected areas, I have found a few sims/families (mainly students that started moved into 'houses' in Riverblossom Hills -> Sim State University) that I never played at all, yet were messed up.
• Toying around in Pleasantview, the only problem, which is in Pleasantview itself, appears to be the sims and their houses being 'in limbo'. Everything is okay in the connected areas. I had one of my sims in Bluewater Village actually call and invite over one of the 'missing' sims, and the 'missing' sim showed and I got them to move in. The 'missing' sim was intact, and brought in a lot of money, so the sim and their house were still 'there' in the data, just no longer where they 'should' be.
• I did very little with Strangetown and Veronaville since I got Sims 2, but what little I checked with troubleshooting showed they were intact. Strangetown never had much done past moving sims from family bin into houses, and generating the connected areas, not much to trouble shoot there. Veronaville being the same, except having used Bianca Monty before, and she was intact along with the house I made for her.

Overall, I have found very little in common with the problems I had last time.

I and starting to think that the main problem might be human error on my part, since nothing really seems consistent with the problems I had last time.
If there was a corrupt file somewhere, it seems like it would produce more consistent problems of some sort.


On a related question to backups (or two or three).
When reinstalling and planning to load backups...
Was I right to have installed TS2 and the needed EPs/SPs, patch each one after they were installed, then restore the backup?
Or should I have installed what was needed first, restored the backup and then patched the EPs/SPs?
Should I test play before or after I restore the backup.


I do got my old backup copied over from my secondary HDD, I got it sitting in its own folder with my other TS2 backup stuff, so that is ready to go when needed.




I basically stare at the Bon Voyage screen a few minutes before I even see the loading bar twitch, then the game loads with all the stock settings, the 4 basic neighborhoods with no extra areas associated them, and all the stock sims where they start at (be it in a lot or in the family bin)
Although, it's hard to diagnose problems with sims I have used if there are no sims I have used left to test stuff on.
I like to find and fix or otherwise find ways to prevent problems, not simply sweep them under the rug.


I am curious, if I delete The Sims 2 folder, copy over the older The Sims 2 folder, then start up The Sims 2, would Pets and Bon Voyage 'regenerate'/'re-add' the stuff they added in the first place since they were no longer present?
Or should I just uninstall Pets and Bon Voyage, then bring out the older backup since I will have all that was installed when it was made months ago, and then reinstall Pets and the other expansions?

Any way to take my older backup (entire The Sims 2 folder) and 'copy' my more recent (Neighborhoods and Downloads folders only) to 'update' the older stuff like that? Or would that just break stuff again?

Edit:
Go figure, my post refuses to post, refresh, try again, try a third time, refresh, still nothing, try one last time, still gives me some message of not being able to post, then I give up and do other things, come back to try again and find FOUR duplicate posts...
Hence three deleted posts of 'darn forum lag'....

Edit 2:
Since I deleted the entire The Sims 2 folder to test game stability in general, and had no troubles, I decided to simply delete it again, and I copied over my older backup The Sims 2 folder and see what happens.
I haven't played much, and only checked a few random sims in Riverblossom Hills and Pleasantview, but everything seems okay, no 'errors' or problems beyond a 1 second pause in the music when the loading screen was doing the 'pets' thing while loading Riverblossom Hills. The game did add in the Pets and Bon Voyage sims/pets into the family bins, and asked me if I wanted it to generate the vacation areas.

The older backup is more out of date than I thought, 1 sim is not there, the stock house they used to live in appears to never had been moved into in the first place, and their gf is back to being a bit miserable with a pair of servos and no greenhouse in the backyard...
Oh well, considering all the troubles I have had recently, it is a drop in the bucket and a minor loss.

I will continue to play Sims 2 a little bit, to see if any problems pop up or get found or not. If everything seems okay, then I will move onto the other EPs and SPs.

Update 3:
Despite some real life distractions, I have managed to get everything installed, and played a few more hours of Sims 2 with all my expansions/stuff packs installed. I have not encountered any real problems, other than some minor lag that occurs for a few moments shortly after entering an apartment lot.
I have not restored my Downloads folder yet, due to concerns of if all of it would be compatible with the newer expansions, but it should not be a problem since I am playing in the AL neighborhood right now and am will probably be a while before I get back to sims or lots that have custom content.

Although, playing Sims 2 is proving to be an obstacle to me getting around to installing The Sims 3 Collectors Edition. :D

Last edited by rditto48801 : 3rd Jun 2009 at 11:51 PM. Reason: another update.