<span style="color: white;">Yesterday was not a good day for me. Several people told me that reinstalling Steam could help fix the intermittent slowdowns and choke in CS:S I had. I backed up the GCF files, and I backed up my cfg directory, but forgot my MAPS! Of course "cancel" actually means "finish what you're doing" so I watched as the uninstaller proceeded to delete everything. I was pretty pissed off, then I remembered there are programs that can restore deleted files. I thought about it for a second and remembered it was a tool from Symantec, so I went to their website and found out it was Norton GoBack.

I got GoBack, installed it, and it couldn't find anything! I read the fine print and found out it can only restore stuff deleted AFTER it's installed. So then I went to google and found the delightful (and free) PC Instpector File Recovery, which found and restored the only map I was worried about. End of story thank you god, I thought. I tried opening the vmf, and it came up with a blank map. I opened the vmf in notepad and got stuff like this, and one part of the file contained stuff about Symantec Corporation and references to other files. There was still some VMF stuff in there, so I saved a new vmf and copy-pasted all that was intact. The file is about a third of the size of the original at 320KB, and looks like this in hammer. To me that is very depressing. What I think happened was when GoBack wrote it's cache to disk (it writes an 8GB cache), it wrote parts of it over the file I was trying to restore. I didn't understand what GoBack's purpose was or how it worked, so it was mostly me screwing up. What perplexes me is why I thought anything from Symantec would help :/

So.... IF EVER YOU ACCIDENTALLY DELETE AN IMPORTANT FILE: get that free utility and install it on the hard disk that the file you want is NOT on, since it could be overwritten. Then enjoy the sweet taste of knowledge learnt from the mistakes of others.
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o

ouch!

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i eat paint

Sorry to hear about that mate, I guess it's just another firm reminder to people to keep backups eh! Your images aren't working for my by the way.

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[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

I'm sorry to hear that man. At least you got some of it back :\

I've accidentally lost all my maps as well, that's why I keep em in a different root folder than just the Steam directory.

yeah, I've done that before. Everyone has to do it once.

I use CPS UnDelete/UnFormat.

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Better to be in denial than to be human.

Bill Gates understands binary: his company is number one, and his customers are all zeros.

[quote="AtM"]keep em in a different root folder than just the Steam directory[/quote]
I can't believe I never thought of that.

I found an autosave of two "builds" back that is intact :biggrin:
I'm just glad there was not more done on the map when it got deleted, I'll still have to do a lot of stuff over, but it could have been a lot worse :smile: The way I do "builds" is append _aX to the name, where X is a number, and I make a new save every time I compile or make big changes or additions (or rather when I remember after making big changes or additions). Now I'm thinking I'll just append the date to the end of the filename, or change the number every time I work on the map.

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o

Glad you found a backup Baron! Keeping backups after every major change is a very good idea.