Bought a new PC, old one completely reinstalled Windows so no access to local files. I assumed my profile was stored somewhere either in Dovetail Live or Steam Cloud, but I'm starting to suspect I'm wrong. I'm logged in Dovetail Live in the game, but was asked to create a new profile. No signs of the old profile. Is there any way I can get my profile back or is it lost forever now?
It's stored in Documents\My Games\TrainSimWorld5\Saved, so if you did a clean install of windows and didn't have an image backup somewhere you are out of luck. And this is a large part of why I keep a separate drive which I do a full windows image backup to every other day. It's helped me recover from a whole bunch of save corrupting issues with games over the years, by mounting the windows drive images and recovering versions of the files from before the issue began. I've also used this means to transfer all my saves for games between my last several PCs.
For the future, you could get a "SAMSUNG 990 PRO SSD NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen4, M.2 2280" Digital Storage Capacity 2 TB and a 40 Gbps M.2 NVMe Enclosure with Cooling Fan or "Dual-Bay Offline Clone "Tool-Free"/Storage NVMe M.2 SSD Enclosure 40Gbps USB4 with Cooling Fan <-- I am looking into getting one of these, the ones I have, have no active cooling other than a thermal pad and the Enclosure. And they work great, for backing up files locally. Found on one of the most popular retail site which sells food also
In the last year I have had TWO Samsung drives die, one a data recovery firm was able to get the data off, the other was declared e-waste. I would never touch Samsung again as they are apparently "amongst the most common for out of the blue failure". since then I've gone with Crucial.
I'll second the reliability of Crucial's drives. I use 4TB P3s for most things, and have never run into issues.
Sorry to hear that, I have been using Samsung for about 5 or 6 years now, as well as a couple of thumb 32 GB sticks, "knock on Wood," I have not had any issues with the drives I have purchased. At the same time, I use a paid service for off-site backup, unlimited backup of our PC for a yearly fee.
