Server crashed an hour before hosting a game, I had 3 worlds in my file saved until my computer crashed and when I returned to the site my worlds had disappeared. Is there a backup file or storage I can get them back??
Anything you did on Forge-vtt.com would’ve been saved as you worked on it, not left “open” and affected at all by your personal computer crashing.
Feel free to hop over here to troubleshoot with us: https://discord.gg/SeHEfzh but it sounds like you were working on your local FoundryVTT instance.
I think you’ve confused here “server crashed” with “computer crashed”. Looking at the logs and trying to be a good detective and figure out what happened to you, here’s what I think happened :
- You were in a game then it started throwing errors or stopped responding, you couldn’t move tokens, or send chat, etc…
- You thought that meant “the server crashed” so you reloaded the page
- It said “no game is loaded” and were sent back to the setup page
- There were no worlds in the setup page.
Looking at the logs, here’s what I see :
- At 3:57PM you launched your server and logged in as admin in the setup page, then launched the world and logged in as Game Master
- A couple of minutes later, both
Ra'eedandSin'Daellogged in as well - Up until 5:42PM you were still working on your world, creating items, deleting actors, creating and deleting tokens, clearing the chat log, etc…
- At 5:44PM, you returned to the setup manually from within Foundry.
- At that point (2 seconds later), errors started happening in game as someone was still logged in and was trying to modify actors and chat (that must be what you saw as “the server crashed”, but it was because the world had been shutdown)
- 16 minutes later, you posted here about the fact that all your worlds had been deleted.
I don’t see anything in the logs that says that any data was deleted because Foundry doesn’t write that information to the log file unfortunately, but it’s quite likely that they were deleted manually from the setup page. I also don’t see any “Admin authentication” in the log other than the first one you did nearly 2 hours before in order to launch your world, so this tells me that whoever deleted your worlds, did it from your computer. I had originally assumed one of the other 2 logged in players had both a GM role in the world and had known your admin access key, but since I don’t see any new admin authentication in the log, I’m tempted to say that’s not what happened, though I’m not 100% sure.
So I think the first question to ask is : Did someone access your computer and deleted those worlds manually because they wanted to be malicious for some reason ? Or did you delete them yourself by mistake ? Or Foundry VTT itself really had a very strange bug where it deleted your worlds for no good reason ? Either way, I think it’s all very unlikely, so I don’t know what happened, but the facts are as I’ve shown and they point to someone using your computer to go back to setup and deleted the worlds manually.
As for backups, yes, I do have backups, the last ones for your account is from 2 days ago. There were only 2 worlds though, not 3 as you claimed, so the 3rd one must have been recent.
Those backups however are meant as a security measure in case of a catastrophic datacenter error or an accidental data corruption caused by me or by the software. They aren’t meant as a way to recover from accidental user errors.
As a rule of thumb, you should always make your own backups. The Forge gives you the ability to export a backup of your world at any time, so it’s recommended that you make use of that feature. World Builder tier would come with a backup system that would be automatic and sends the backups to an external repository you would control, so you don’t have to do it manually every time. Even though that feature isn’t yet available, until I add support for the external git backup system, I’d be willing to make an exception and recover data from my own system backups. Since restoring content from my backups is a process that takes time and effort, it would only be done exceptionally for World Builder users only, and only until the automated external backups are in place.