6

I recently went to continue an old game of Mass Effect 2 and was disappointed to find that all of my save files were missing.

That's Ok, I thought, I hadn't got that far in, I'll just restart the game with one of my Mass Effect 1 save files. That's when I found that they were missing too!

That's Ok, I thought, I'll recover them from backups. That's when I found that the directories where the Mass effect save files are now (C:\Users\...\Documents\BioWare\Mass Effect 2), were created when I recently opened the game, didn't exist before and thus there were no backups from that location!

So, how do I find my old Mass Effect save files? Did Steam once put ME1/2 save files in a different location? I.e has the location of save files changed? If so, where did they used to be?

Has anyone else experienced Mass Effect save files disappearing? If so, how did you recover your save files/where did you find them?

If it makes any difference, I think my upgrade to Windows 7 was after the last time I played either of these games, so I wonder if the OS change may have also affected the save game location.

As suggested, I installed MASGAU, sadly it only finds the current, empty save directory.

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

If you find yourself managing save files often, you could give MASGAU a try. It is a save-file manager that can scan your drive for saves, so you could use it to find your saves (if they are still existing).

Always make backups! (BTW MASGAU's primary function is backup & restore of save files).

Improve this answer
9
  • The whole of my hard drive is continuously backed up, but as far as I can see, the save directories have never existed in that location before.
    – Mark Booth
    Commented Sep 28, 2015 at 15:53
  • Often Steam game profiles are in a different folder than the standalone one. Have you scdanned for saves with masgau?
    – beppe9000
    Commented Sep 28, 2015 at 16:59
  • Yes @beppe9000 I asked MASGAU to search the whole of my machine, including all hard drives.
    – Mark Booth
    Commented Jun 7, 2018 at 10:01
  • You could try to intall Everything and search manually for known file names.
    – beppe9000
    Commented Jun 7, 2018 at 15:16
  • I don't see how Everything could help, since I have no idea what the files were called, when they were deleted or what path they were deleted from. Everything can't search the CDP history database, for that I need to know which directory they were deleted from, hence my question.
    – Mark Booth
    Commented Jun 7, 2018 at 15:48

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .