Hello,
upon logging in today I noticed that many of my addons have been reset to default settings and the previously created profiles were gone. The following addons were effected:
weakauras, shadowed unitframes, omni bar, TomTom, Method Dungeon Tools, gladius, move anything… and more
So do these store their profiles in an other directory? As bartender or TellMeWhen did not reset for example.
Is there a way to restore these? (Others are not that big of a problem, but all my weakauras being gone is a real pain in the a…)
The client installed an update today, I suspect that may be the reason.
There are basically 2 failsafes, but they’re very fragile.
The first failsafe when addonsettings seem to have failed to load properly, is to be aware that the active settings aren’t maintained on disk (only in memory). They won’t be written to disk until you do a clean exit or perhaps a /reload or the like.
So if you just loaded into a corrupted situation, it’s best to:
- Immediately make a backup of your WoW’s
WTF folder, even while wow is still running.
- Kill wow (using Alt+F4 or using the task manager) instead of cleanly clicking Exit.
- Make another backup again, just in case.
The second failsafe is that every time the (updated) settings are written to disk (so every time you quit the game), the existing .lua SavedVariable-files are copied to a .lua.bak-suffixed version in the same folders. This happens just before the active settings are written to the .lua version.
So in effect:
- The currently active values of any SavedVariable exist only in memory.
- The
.lua SavedVariable-files should hold the values from prior to the last time you exited the game.
- The
.lua.bak SavedVariable-files should hold the values from the second-to-last time you exited the game.
- In simple terms, every time you quit the game: the
.lua.bak files are deleted, the .lua files are renamed to .lua.bak, and the updated data from memory is saved as .lua.
The wow client ignores the .lua.bak files, it doesn’t read these files at all, and only writes to them just prior to altering the .lua-version. Deleting them does no harm (they are just backups).
If you find yourself in the situation where the .lua.bak-files contain your data, but the .lua versions are trashed, you could:
- make sure wow is not running (kill with taskmanager or alt-F4)
- recursively delete all these
.lua files
- recursively rename (or copy) all the
.lua.bak-files to .lua
1 Like
While not a solution to the current problem I strongly recommend everyone to make regular backups of the WTF/Interface folders either using your normal backup software (you do use one, right?) or some other tool, or even manually.
For basic backups FreeFileSync is probably sufficient if you enable versioning so that the old versions are kept as well, but I am sure there are easier/better software to handle old versions, too.
1 Like