All my saves are gone!

Here is the scenario :

I had a bug with the RetroArch launcher. The starting screen was stuck. So I just decide to reinstall RetroArch, I checked on the site, and there was the new 1.7.5 . Mine was 1.7.4. After the new install, the launcher problem was still there, so I decide to uninstall RetroArch.

And WHAT THE FUCK !!! the uninstall program uninstalled all the folders, the saves, the images, the bios, everything. I didn’t even had a warning message or something !!! Everything was deleted !!!

How is this even possible ! this represent hours and hours of play

Is there a solution ?

Hey, I’m sorry to say that there’s no solution for this currently. When the uninstaller removes the RetroArch directory, it removes the subdirectories, as well, including the save/state directories.

We’ve had someone else report running into the same issue, so we will explore adding some sort of warning or something so this doesn’t catch people off-guard in the future.

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that sounds bad. user-folders should be saved when uninstalling. does this mean if someone already download the very huge GB worth of thumbnails, this will be removed when uninstalling?

If they’re in the RetroArch directory, yeah.

I know if you uninstall a game from Steam, it doesn’t touch any files/directories that you’ve added yourself (e.g., modded files), so maybe we can do something like that /shrug

It’s a big big problem ! because you can have saves, RetroAchievment snapshots, bios and more… It’s the first time in my all life that I see a program who delete everything without warning.

In my case, I was able to find all my saves and other files, thanks to a recovery software (recuva).

But you must do something to prevent this from happening again. Thanks

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I have an idea to recover your saves.

Download Recuva or Pandora Disk Drill

The saves are .srm file extension, states are .state1, 2, 3 extension.

Do a search for those extensions on your drive.

If it finds any files recover them to an external flash drive, not to C:\ drive or it could overwrite.

Once it’s all done, copy the recovered .srm files to your new RetroArch saves folder.

I hope it can recover the original file names, if not you’ll have to rename manually to match the rom file names.

I know this topic was about 3 years ago, but I just ran into a HUGE issue.

I tried to run the RetroArch Uninstall program, as I didn’t exactly “need” it anymore. But when I did, every single one of my files and folders in my ‘Downloads’ folder somehow was wiped from my computer. When I tried to recover at least some of them, Windows was unable to find the main ‘Downloads’ folder, as it was removed from the disk.

I’m starting to panic as I had some important files/folders in there.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

I would be interested in how to backup saves or memory cards as well. I’m new to retroarch and just started using it coming from individual emu apps. I usually backup memory card folders. Can I just copy the saves folders to another pc and it would have my latest memory cards per console?

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That just happened to me. Right now I’m trying to run the Windows File Recovery to see if I can get some of the saves/states/firmware back. This is really awful.

Please at least add a warning to the uninstaller.

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Never trust uninstallers. Always backup your files and often. I have 2 backups of the whole RA folder, including the cores, the cfgs, saves, everything. This has saved me many tmes. Even from a HDD failure.

I know i sound like captain hindsight here but if you really care about your files, you would have backups of them.

Also, Retroarch is portable, you can copy the files from a zip archive, it doesn’t need an installer ot uninstaller.

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