Data Loss?

[Elf_Lord]

Data Loss? (Solved)

I have no idea quite what to label this as, so I'm just going to write my narrative and hope for the best:

I've been working on a campaign for the last several weeks and I was a couple of missions in at this point, but I'd been noticing for a few weeks that the campaign files were only visible in the editor or the game; I couldn't find them in Explorer or any other program. This kinda bothered me for a while, but it never caused any problems, so I started ignoring it. Well, this morning I went in to fix an error with a loading screen I noticed the other day, so I went into the campaign in the editor, but when I was done editing it wouldn't save the map. All it would do is complain of being unable to find the "WorldEditTemp" folder, and when I manually generated the folder, it began asking for several folders inside it, at which point I stopped and deleted the folder. I tried to run World Editor as an administrator, wondering if the program was having permission errors creating the folders, but when I did that, my campaign was just gone. It - not to mention any other campaign file I had generated - had disappeared from my recent files and from the campaign folder, and when I went into Frozen Throne to check if it was still in the game, it prompted me to create a new single-player ID because apparently my old ones (including WorldEdit) were gone. I wondered for a while if the entire game had had some sort of giant freak data dump, but it still remembered the last name I had used in multiplayer, so I'm totally stumped.

The files are still there when I open the editor in non-administrator mode, but I still can't save any of the files, and I still can't find any of them outside of the editor. I opened Frozen Throne again just to be sure and it prompted me to make a new single-player ID a second time, even though I'd just made one five minutes before. I've started running that as administrator as well and it remembers my ID now, but my campaign is still gone, as are any map files I have created outside of the campaigns. All I know is that I have lost several weeks' work across two campaigns with no idea how to recover the files or if they even can be recovered. Any insight here would be appreciated because I have seen nothing like this before.

I'm trying to add screenshots but I can't get them to link from my gallery, so I'm just going to post the links to them. Sorry...

http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/members/143048-albums8336-picture100364.html
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/members/143048-albums8336-picture100365.html
http://www.hiveworkshop.com/forums/members/143048-albums8336-picture100366.html

 

[Xonok]

It seems that your warcraft installation is in the default folder and you have Windows Vista or something newer as your operating system.
The problem comes from windows trying to restrict any kind of malware in specific folders (Program Files, for instance).
You should set WC3 and the world editor to open with administrator rights every time it opens. It's in Properties -> Compatibility.
Alternatively you can move your WC3 folder to My Documents, like I did.

 

[Elf_Lord]

I have set them to automatically run as administrator now, which at least makes them function a little more... consistently. My problem now is that I need to find a way to recover these files, if it's at all possible, but the only program that can seem to find them now is non-admin World Editor, and it can't seem to save them anymore because of the WorldTemp error. Any ideas?

 

[Xonok]

When browsing them with your non-admin editor it should be possible to find the folder that you're in.

 

[Elf_Lord]

According to the non-admin editor, they're in the Campaigns folder, just like all the campaigns I've downloaded. I just can't find them in any other program, which makes it difficult to try to restore them. I tried searching my WarCraft III folder in Explorer with the exact file name and couldn't find it. Right now I'm going to try saving the campaign in a bunch of different folders and see if any of them take.

Ha! That worked! Thank you so much for your help! Now I'm just kinda curious why this took so long to happen. I've been running Warcraft like this for months now.