Am I hosed?

[jsalemi]

I was having a problem moving a sim into a dorm (game kept crashing right after she turned to a YA). After playing with it for a while, and seeing if I can fix the problem in SimPe, I decided the heck with it, and restored a backup of the neighborhood. It's about 2 weeks old, but I'd rather live with that then have to start from the ground up again.

But, when I went back into the game, the neighborhood (Pleasantview) doesn't appear at all in the neighborhood chooser screen!  So, is there anyway to get it back other than doing a complete reinstall of the game and then restoring the neighborhood from the backup? Or am I in for an evening of CD swapping?

No OFB yet; just Uni and NL, if it makes a difference.

Thanks for any guidance you can give me!

[MissDoh]

Was the N001 folder part of your back-up? (in the neighborhoods folder).  If so it is weird it does not appear.

Anyway here is what I suggest, and you can do that whenever you want a fresh start and don't want to reinstall.

Go in you c:/mydocuments/eagames folder and delete TheSims 2 folder (don't forget to copy your downloads folder and other folders you want to keep)

Restart your game, it will take longer than usual to start since the game will recreate all the missing folders.

When that is done, quit your game, and copy & paste your other neighborhoods folder (except N001 which is not working) from your back-up in over in the Neighborhoods folder.

You will then have a fresh N001 hood which is Pleasantview and restore your old neighborhoods.

I also suggest you delete the groupe.cache before you restart the game with the file copied (located in theSims2 folder), the game will generate a new one automaticaly.

[jsalemi]

Yea, it was part of the backup; that's why I thought it was weird too that it didn't appear after I restored the backup.

Anyway, thanks for the info!  I'll do it the way you suggest, and then restore my Pleasantview from the last good backup I have. It'll save a lot of time doing it this way rather than reinstalling from scratch.

[Simlover]

Just check you dont have 2 x N001's in your folder

[Ancient Sim]

Did you restore via SimPE?  If so, if the back-up was an automatic one, it will have put the entire Neighbourhood folder into another folder (this will be named with the back-up number and date), which the game cannot read (neither can SimPE).  You have to manually remove the neighbourhod files and put them back into the Neighbourhood folder. 

[jsalemi]

This particular backup wasn't with SimPE; my external HD came with backup software that I use to do incremental backups of the whole Sims2 directory once a week. My last SimPE backup is about 2 weeks old, so I'm going with the more recent one.   MissDoh's info was great, and the game did as she said it would, so in a little bit I'll be heading up to my office and desktop and restoring the stuff. Here's hoping!

[MissDoh]

Like SimLover mention just make sure your back-up copies will be copied over the existing one and not create a N002 subfolder in the N002 folder (for example).  This would give the game very weird info.  The best would be to delete the N00X folder you do not wish to keep and simply copy&paste the one you want to place back in the neighborhoods folder.

[jsalemi]

Thanks again -- I'll do exactly that!

[MissDoh]

Why can I almost see the tail of the dog in your avatar shake of hapiness! 

[jsalemi]

Thanks to you all -- I've got my Pleasantview up and running again with no loss of characters.  A week behind, but I can live with that.