Had to reboot during reload-hang - all addons reset help!

[Elrandir]

Sorry for another post in the same forum but this is an emergency. I had to reload in Siege of Org because Raven was acting up and not showing my buffs correctly anymore. I'm stuck on the loading screen for over five minutes so I decide to reboot as none of the windows commands are working to tab out, bring up task manager etc. I come back in wow and it appears all my addons have reset for all characters. I have a custom UI and it's going to take hours of work to put everything back together. I just resubbed today and it was my 2nd lfr , is there any way to fix this without having to redo the entire ui?

Edit: after some research it seems I'm screwed. Lesson learned, backing up my addon & WTF folders after every change/update now. Guess it won't hurt to have a fresh start, maybe it'll mean less LUA errors...

[stevietv]

do your lua files in the SavedVariables folder have any .bak equivalents?

[Elrandir]

Oh forgot all about that, gonna backup everything and try renaming those thanks.
edit: ah crap already botched those by configuring stuff and logging out tons of times and copy pasting from an older wow install. Bah.

[Rosefirelite]

Such is the problems of using a custom UI. But add-ons should be quick to replace as most raiders use only Deadly Boss Mods, Addon Control Panel, OmniCC and a few others Icy-veins has a guide for druids

[Pelf]

Everybody should consider backing up their WTF directory to Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive or something like that. As those services usually require all the files to be in a single folder, you will need to make a directory junction to fool WoW into thinking the WTF folder is there when it really isn't (or to fool Dropbox into thinking the WTF folder is there when it isn't; I have the junctions in my WoW folder). Dropbox has better change history support for arbitrary files than Google Drive does, it seems; so, that's what I use.

If you do set that up, I wouldn't let the Dropbox client run all the time as you'll end up with an utterly useless change history as it will update every time you log out or reload UI. The change history is a great perk as once you have that you can roll back configuration mistakes or whatever settings to previous values.

[autopsy]

I personally use Cobian Backup for my WoW WTF/Addons folders (amongst other things). It creates a full copy of my addons and settings on a schedule (once a month) and then a differential backup twice a week (this contains copies of any files that have changed since the previous full backup). These are zipped and saved into my dropbox. This means my addon configs are backup up often and can easily restore to a previous date if the configs are corrupted or to undo any possible changes. Probably a sledge hammer to crack a nut type setup but I use it for other stuff too.

[Deleted]

This has happened to me twice now. On the first occasion, I suddenly crash while on my Hunter. After rebooting and logging back in, all the profiles were deleted from every single add-on.

Have had some drivers issues as of late and yesterday it happened again. I was relogging and suddenly my computer freezes. I reboot and log back in to see everything deleted on all characters:/

I'll be sure to make a backup to Dropbox this time for sure, but didn't think it would help. I mean, the Interface folder and WTF folder are there. All the add-ons are there, only the settings are gone.

I really don't get, how all the profiles can just be deleted like that. Why does this happen?

[Deleted]

The WTF folder itself is still there, but the content of the addon SavedVariables files in the WTF folder isn't.

Essentially, when the WoW client closes, it goes through a list of global variables addons have registered as containing their settings and writes them to disk. This issue happens if:

• The stored variable content has not yet been (fully) loaded when the client closes (crash during loading screen) - the "client exiting" code still runs, but the variables are empty. Thus, the client writes "empty variable" into all configuration files. This usually causes the entire UI to be reset to default configurations
• The client was in the process of replacing old stored data with new stored data and crashes right after wiping the old data but before (fully) writing the new data; this usually causes a single addon's configuration to disappear/be broken

[Deleted]

The WTF folder itself is still there, but the content of the addon SavedVariables files in the WTF folder isn't.

Essentially, when the WoW client closes, it goes through a list of global variables addons have registered as containing their settings and writes them to disk. This issue happens if:

• The stored variable content has not yet been (fully) loaded when the client closes (crash during loading screen) - the "client exiting" code still runs, but the variables are empty. Thus, the client writes "empty variable" into all configuration files. This usually causes the entire UI to be reset to default configurations
• The client was in the process of replacing old stored data with new stored data and crashes right after wiping the old data but before (fully) writing the new data; this usually causes a single addon's configuration to disappear/be broken

Okay that makes sense. So what I actually need to make a copy of, is the saved variables files yes?

Although I'm going to reformat this Thursday to hopefully get rid of the issue with my computer randomly freezing:/

[Pelf]

If you back up your WTF folder you'll back up all of your settings. Treeston's talking about what happened to you, not what would happen if you backed it up. Just make sure not to run the client all the time (only update the files every time you make a big UI change or once every week or so) and you'll have a useful history that you can use to even roll back the settings of a specific addon.

[Deleted]

Okay I see. Ty for the help then.