Help! Lost my mission

[markturner1960]

Hi, I have been building a mission and had to quit out after inserting a FARP template went wrong.....I had previously saved multiple times and so quit without saving to lose my mistake....however, on trying to re open the mission, its not showing in the missions list? Its there in file explorer, in saved games, DCS, missions, but does not in the ME...but the file size shows zero.....

 

Whats occuring please? How can it have previously saved several times and yet its lost now? 

Edited January 16, 2023 by markturner1960

[Hiob]

Probably a corrupted file. Such things can happen unfortunetly. That is why you backup important stuff.

Google "restore corrupted files" or something along those lines. There are several tools meant to find and repair deleted or corrupted files. Brace for disappointment though.

Sometimes you're just out of luck.

[markturner1960]

Damn, 3 hours of my life gone!!! I had saved carefully throughout as well, in case of just this....

Perhaps you could also help with a secondary query.....I want to place a FARP template, but when I press load, it seems I have no control over where it is placed....its multiple units etc so I cant just drag it where it needs to be either.....

 

Thanks

[Hiob]

Sorry to hear. Have you tried to restore the file?

However, I'm no expert - neither in data forensic nor in mission building. Probably best to make a specific topic on the latter and ask some people who are way better with thiss stuff.

[razo+r]

Unforunately this topic has been brought up several times as of now and there's been only complete silence from ED about this issue.

IF you manage to see that your save file has been corrupted, the best thing you can do is to save the mission as a static template and load that one in a new mission.

[MadDog-IC]

On 1/16/2023 at 11:19 PM, markturner1960 said:

Hi, I have been building a mission and had to quit out after inserting a FARP template went wrong.....I had previously saved multiple times and so quit without saving to lose my mistake....however, on trying to re open the mission, its not showing in the missions list? Its there in file explorer, in saved games, DCS, missions, but does not in the ME...but the file size shows zero.....

Whats occuring please? How can it have previously saved several times and yet its lost now? 

 

Whilst it is to late now, when saving missions, the safer way is to save regularly and to have multiple versions of saves of the same mission, I save every time to a new indexed named mission file when I have done some substantial changes so that if any thing goes wrong I only loss the last changes and not the whole mission. I assume when you saved often that you just over wrote the same mission file, if so this is frought with danger as you have found out.

As to why this happens I can't say definatively, but if the mission editor has a rare issue on saving to disk it will usually create a LUA script error in the DCS.log file and will write a 0 or partial size length corrupt mission file to disk because the script that writes the complete code to the mission files has crashed at some point and didn't complete its job.

DCS also has an auto backup feature now, it should backup the mission every 5 mins if enabled so you should see how that works and see if that actually made a backup of your mission. I haven't used it myself yet as I don't do to much mission editing these days.

DCS Mission Editor Auto Backup Feature

If you haven't run DCS since the issue, you may be able to recover a temp image of the mission file that dcs makes when you run the mission. ie TEMP=C:\Users\YourUSERNAME\AppData\Local\Temp FOLDER

I am available to help in anyway I can, but it sounds like there is very little hope of any recovery of a working mission file.

Regards, Ian.

Edited January 17, 2023 by MadDog-IC
Adding more info

[cfrag]

7 hours ago, MadDog-IC said:

the safer way is to save regularly

Whilst this is true in general terms, I should note that ME does not save "atomically" (save to new file first, and only after successfully writing the new file, overwrite the old), and therefore immediately overwrites an existing mission while saving. If such a save fails, your mission is gone no matter how regularly you save since it's the save process itself that kills the mission. This happened to me often enough to stress the importance of @MadDog-IC's second recommendation:

7 hours ago, MadDog-IC said:

have multiple versions of saves of the same mission

Strangely, DCS's Auto Backup system already implements 90% of "atomic" saves, and I'm left wondering why ED have not used this opportunity to also take the last step and ensure that missions are only overwritten once the save process succeeds.

Here's to hoping that this improves some day.

Edited January 18, 2023 by cfrag

[Rudel_chw]

8 hours ago, MadDog-IC said:

have multiple versions of saves of the same mission,

To avoid cluttering my mission folder with multiple files of the same mission file, I opted to store my whole mission folder on a cloud drive (by means of an mklink ) that has versioning capability, so that I can return to a prior point in time of any mission file, like this:

 

 

Edited January 18, 2023 by Rudel_chw

[dark_wood]

@Rudel_chw image path is broken, can you repost it?

Which cloud drive with versioning do you use? If is not a secret

[Rudel_chw]

8 minutes ago, dark_wood said:

@Rudel_chw image path is broken, can you repost it?

Which cloud drive with versioning do you use? If is not a secret

no secret  I use microsoft’s OneDrive

[markturner1960]

Thanks for the replies