PC crashed and some addon settings are gone

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1

How does blizzard store addon settings/configurations? When my PC crashed due to razer driver problem, all of my weakauras, prat settings are gone. Even *.lua.bak files are empty. It is a terrible programming decision to save addon data on exiting WoW gracefully, if it is how it is done currently. Crashes can happen due to many reasons, WoW must be robust against these anomalies. I can not imagine what kind of programming cause addon data and its backup to be purged at the same time.

2

Hey there Sheida,

It’s a bit of a mix between local and online storage depending on which exact settings we’re talking about. It is however the case that most addon specific changes made in a session would be lost in the event of a crash or disconnect.

To prevent issues like this, I’d recommend always logging out normally after making significant edits.

You can also find more info related to this here: World of Warcraft In Game Settings Resetting on Logout, and if you need further assistance with addon configurations you may want to swing by the UI and Macro forums.

I hope you can still get your setup sorted again without too much trouble!

3

Thanks for fast response. I want to explain what happened in order;

  1. I logout of my account
  2. WoW main login screen is still on(where you enter password)
  3. I put my computer to sleep, go to bed.
  4. In the morning, I see my PC crashed with rzudd.sys(razer driver)
  5. I see my wow launcher does not know where my WoW is installed, so I manually show it.
  6. I login to my character, all Prat settings are gone, or WeakAuras auras(like showing remaining dot duration on char etc)

So, I definitely was logged out of my character/account when crash happened. What I can gather is, as long as WoW.exe is still running, addon Saved Variables are susceptible to be purged. Even if you are not logged in to your character. By the way, I know when you logout non-gracefully(alt F4 or pc crash) after making some addon changes, those specific changes are not saved. My problem is on whole another level, my older weakauras auras was gone, all of them, that were perfectly saved before today.
Not: Addons have additional backup lua files with the extension .bak. Even my weakauras backup lua was purged to original version(bew installed empty bak file)

4

And that’s why you should make backups. In case of WoW’s addon settings you should copy the files somewhere else from time to time.

Microsoft has old tool called SyncToy which can be helpful on simple backups though optimally you should have proper backups on your data with version history etc. stored in some other location.

5

Point of my post is not asking “How can I prevent such disasters next time”. The point is trying to learn if Blizzard really has chosen a terrible way to store addon settings, in this case: exiting the game gracefully.

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6

Getting blue screen of death is not exiting game gracefully as anything not written in the disk would go poof if computer crashes when coming out from the suspend state. Or like in your case something got corrupted causing loss of data.