Hammer just deleted all of my progress and I have no backups. What do I do now?

[Daddy Warbucks]

I've been working on a map for about a week now. I'm a mac user making it pretty hard to use hammer so instead I use VMWare Fusion as a windows emulator. I went to class today and came back to be greeted with my emulator having to restart windows, which was fine it's not something I haven't had to do before but when I got back to the desktop and opened hammer to work some more, I was greeted with and absolute blank slate where my map should have been. I don't have autosaves on (I wasn't aware this was a feature) so that's out the door already. All I really have left is a bsp file that's a bit out of date since I've made more changes and a prt file (whatever that is). I'm not really sure what to do next since I'd rather not start all over again. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Da Spud Lord]

Have you checked the VMX file? The VMX file is identical to the VMF, but slightly behind version-wise to function as a backup of the VMF. To open the VMX in Hammer, rename it and change the file extension to VMF, and open that in Hammer.

 

[Daddy Warbucks]

Tried that. Didn't work.

 

[nesman]

if you have compiled the map you could end up decompiling what you have and trying that

 

[ics]

Well, next time take backups and save to different file too. If you tried everything else, there could be autosave in C:\HammerAutosave but its also unlikely.

 

[Daddy Warbucks]

I'll try the decompile thing since I have a bsp but i did a lot more since that compile so it'll be a lot of time lost (honestly might just scrap it), and yes I do have autosaves turned on now. They weren't on before so no autosave but I guess I learned my lesson now.

 

[Daddy Warbucks]

Alright de-compiled the BSP and redid most of the stuff. I have autosaves so I'll be a lot more careful in the future. Thanks for everything!

 

[Empyre]

I wouldn't just trust the autosaves. Make a manual back-up either every night after you finish for the day, or every day before you start. In addition to that, make a back-up before you do something you are not sure of, and/or after you finish a tough bit of editing that you don't want to have to do again. When the mood strikes, delete the older back-ups, keeping the last few. It would be even better if you can make the back-ups on another physical drive. All this might seem a bit overboard, but you would never again lose more than a couple hours of work.

 

[freedom]

ctrl s ctrl s ctrl s

 

[obodobear]

If you haven't already I'd set up a drop box or google drive account to keep your files safe. I lost a lot of progress on some of my maps after a hard drive crash so it's always good to have a place where you can easily recover your files. Like some other people above said too, enabling autosaves and spamming ctrl s never hurt too.

 

[Daddy Warbucks]

Those are good tips. Thanks ya'll!