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

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 All I really have left is a bsp file that's a bit out of date since I've made more changes and a prt file (whatever that is).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!

 

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.

 

Tried that. Didn't work.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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!

 

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.

 

ctrl s ctrl s ctrl s

 

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.

 

Those are good tips. Thanks ya'll!