Before I give up entirely, I thought I'd ask..I've tried using the instructions you have for restoring lost games, but its noy working in this situation. Before I installed version 5 I made a backup copy, but haven't backed it up since. And my games were much further along, 2 in 4th generation.
Somehow, when I moved the LDW file from "owner's documents" to "shared documents" (so someone else could play on her logon, not mine) it wiped out every game I had. All thats in the file now is 0.ldw. It also took out VV2 & VV3.
Is there (pleaseplease) somewhere else I might look? It seems it *must* be in there, somewhere.

Whimsey, r u on a Mac or pc?

On a Mac, there's no backup needed, as long as you store the download in "applications". It should automatically go to version 5 with current generations.

I'm not familiar w/ pcs, sorry.

On the other hand, I know it blows to start all over, but I've found that when I did, the "variety" was better (people choosing; store items, etc.)

Hope all goes well.

Its a PC. Oh well, I did want some new families--just not *all* new ones, lol. The first one had all the house upgrades. That'll teach me to put backups in a different folder!

That blows. I have a folder called "backup", which I include all the files that I've backed up. I had a bunch of stuff from iTunes (movies, music, dvds, etc.) which I accidentally trashed while puter-cleaning. We all learn the hard way! LOL

Whimsey, before you give up completely, use the Windows search function to search for *.ldw (so that you can find every savegame file on your computer that is accessible to your user. Once you have a list of those files, you can look at the dates on them to see how recent they are. You might also want to log on to the other user accounts on the computer and do the same thing.