@winterro wow. Sounds time consuming.

here's a reason why i have a backup drive with 42 280 creations on it

@Boeing727200F nothing to do.
@AndrewGarrison Yeah, wasn’t expecting anything to be possible on your end. Though there was no dialogue, it was entirely spontaneous.
@32 I think that’s fundamentally impossible. Steam accounts are still named the same thing internally, it was fine the first day, and level progress was retained. None of the things a new account do happened.

Ok so I don’t think you’re stupid but one thing that I would probably do would be accidentally create a new Steam account? It would still show all your games as installed on the device, but will it let you play them? It may have messed up during the name change process and somehow glitched you into making a new account.

Ouch, so sorry to hear that Graingy! Sadly there's nothing we can do to help. Hopefully you're able to recover them! Steam Cloud can really stab you in the back if you misclick in that dialog.

any luck?

@HuskyDynamics01 hm

@Graingy The SP2 demo also wouldn't have been subjected to the laptop wipe, so it wouldn't have been missing anything if the Cloud re-backed it up for some reason.

@LM0418 har de har har.

@HuskyDynamics01 That's a lot
Yet I have backup files, but those craft aren't in the cloud. Nothing is. Very odd...
And I think so? Probably? Haven't really checked I don't think.
I assume that SP2 demo would also be on cloud, and it's been fine.

Release the graingy files

@Graingy It should include the simple ones, they're technically stock crafts as well. (You could always just redownload them manually if it doesn't, though.)

All the dates being the same is interesting, and might actually tell us a lot about what happened. I've done a little more research and my original description of how the Steam Cloud works wasn't quite correct; it should only update files that you've edited (and it only actually updates on game close, but that's probably not relevant). That's a key thing though, because by that logic all of the dates should correlate to when you last updated the relevant files. I checked mine for comparison and it does indeed have a bunch of different dates that all appear to roughly match the last time I edited those craft files. So, if yours were all created at the same time this morning, that means that for some reason Steam Cloud updated all of the local files it found on your laptop at the same time. The only reason I can think of for it to back up everything at once is if the previous cloud copy somehow disappeared and it had to create a new one.

I can draw a general hypothetical timeline for what might have happened:
1) At various points in the past, Steam Cloud backed up your craft files as you modified them, creating a cloud-based copy of all of your SP stuff.
2) Your laptop was wiped, but because Steam Cloud was turned on, the game pulled the save data from there, so all your crafts and everything were still accessible, just stored in the cloud instead of locally. (Dunno if this is exactly how it works, but probably close enough.)
3) For some reason, the Steam Cloud data was wiped or reset this morning. There's probably a bunch of ways that this could have happened, but I don't know what they are or what specifically might have happened in your case.
4) Because Steam Cloud was still turned on, it created a new backup of all of the SP data that was on your laptop at 11:23 AM. Unfortunately, because your laptop had been wiped, the only things on it were what you had saved post-wipe, so that's all the data that it found.
5) You opened the game, suspecting nothing amiss, and were met with the horror of a nearly empty craft list.

Something is fishy indeed... Do you still have Steam Cloud data for other games? (If so, do their files share the same creation date?)

@HuskyDynamics01 I'm aware of the button. Not sure if it includes the original ("simple") versions, though.
All dates are October 29, 11:23 AM.
Something is fishy.

@Graingy Like I said, no idea why it took so long for it to do that (and that might not even be what happened, just my guess based on my own experiences with Steam Cloud in the past). The stock craft are saved in the same folder though, so no surprise that they're gone too. There's a button in the settings (accessible from the main menu, not from the flight scene) to restore them, I think, but unfortunately it's only for the stock craft.

Is the "date written" in the Steam Cloud viewer thing the same for all of the saves that it has? I wonder if it just cleared itself and refreshed for some reason. Dunno if that's even a thing it does, but I guess it's a possibility.

@HuskyDynamics01 That was a few weeks ago. Steam cloud held up over that, as it had the time before.
Additionally, even the stock craft are gone.

@Graingy If you wiped your laptop, that would be why. Steam Cloud syncs save data to and from your PC, so it probably overwrote whatever was in the cloud with the more recent data on your laptop, which unfortunately was only the stuff that had been saved after the laptop had been wiped.

The problem in this case is that Steam Cloud isn't very good at understanding what should and shouldn't be kept. It thought it was being good by updating your cloud save data with newer files (since normally the files are first saved to your computer and then copied to the cloud), but to do that it overwrites whatever it had saved previously. Essentially, it replaced the files in the cloud with whatever was in your local save folder, which unfortunately only contained stuff that had been saved after your computer was wiped (since, well, the old ones got wiped).

From my (limited) understanding, your local files are always the "master" copy of whatever is in the Steam Cloud. If stuff gets deleted and then the Steam Cloud decides to update what it has saved, it will also delete files that are no longer present on the local version. I'm not knowledgeable enough about how it works to know why it was working fine between when your computer was wiped and now (can the game pull from both your local files and the cloud? I have no idea), but my guess would be that the cloud saw that everything had been deleted from your computer and went "cool, I'll update my save to match."

Again, no idea why it took so long to do that (or why it didn't detect that your local save and the cloud were no longer synced - normally that's what should happen in cases like this, and it prompts you to choose which one to keep), but that's my guess as to what happened.

@HuskyDynamics01 I looked and there were some there.
HOWEVER those only seem to exist for things that have been saved since my laptop was wiped a few weeks ago. Things have been lost permanently.
Nobody, ever, told me that Steam Cloud was considered unreliable, at least to the extent of deleting stuff spontaneously without prompt.

AppData/LocalLow/Jundroo/SimplePlanes has nothing either?
F.

The .BAK files should still be salvageable by renaming the extension to .XML (at least in theory; I haven't tested it but the file contents are otherwise the same as a regular craft XML), but if you hadn't backed up your local files folder then you might be cooked. To risk stating the obvious, don't trust Steam Cloud. It's known to be unreliable for a lot of games, and I guess SP is on that list too now.

@Graingy yeah, just hope that it wont happen in SP.
I most likely have 3 thousand builds downloaded on my phone over 3 or so years.

@V Already did.
If you're talking about the list of games with file numbers and whatnot, I've already looked there. It's empty of SP files, except AI.
@Boeing727200F D:

i have had a similar situation a couple years ago with a game on steam called storm works. accidently saved over 3 YEARS of crap and had over 5 thousand builds downloaded. pressed a button when downloading a list of builds and suddenly lost 5 thousand builds. yeah I uhhh didn't play the game for 2 whole years till a friend got me back in this year and recovered around 1 thousand though downloaded what I remember.
I swear that everybody has to go through this at least once in their lives.

@Graingy open it in steam or log into steam on your browser before opening it

@Solent Nope, there are files for recently saved planes that caused no issues.

@Graingy i think .bak files are backups of aircrafts that once crashed the game, for example most of my performance-cost-record-setting abominations have a .bak associated with them

could also be wrong but that would make sense