Recovering Data from a Corrupted Hero Lab portfolio
 

Good evening,

My Windows 10 machine had to do a forced restart while I was in a Hero Lab portfolio for my Pathfinder game. When the machine came back up Hero LAb acted like it had never been activated and my portfolio will not open stating:
"Error reading specified file. Please verify that the file exists and is a valid Hero Lab file."

Is there a way to recover the data? It has my PC's for the game I have been running for two years...

Can you copy the portfolio to a new file? Portfolios are Zip files, so if you copy it with a .zip extension you should be able to look at the insides, or at least confirm that it's corrupted.

{nods} Worse comes to worse, you may be able to grab the HTML or XML output and re-enter everything.

@charlieluce, Thank you for that tip! I copied the portfolio and appended the .zip extension to change the file type; however, when attempting to open it I receive the following error: "The Compressed (zipped) folder 'file name' is invalid."

@Duggan, Thank you for the advice. How would you recommend I go about doing that?

Oof... yeah, that sounds like a corrupted archive. My method requires you to be able to open the archive file up still.

There's some options at https://www.raymond.cc/blog/repair-d...d-zip-archive/ for fixing a corrupted archive. I'd advise following one of those to see what can be recovered.

@Duggan,

None of them worked... damn... I am glad some of them had PDF print outs from not too long ago, but it still means a lot of reconstruction. Especially the NPC's I did not have in other portfolios...

Ungh... Thank you for the information though. Would have been amazing if any of them resolved my situation, but still useful to know nonetheless.

One of the perils of compression is that a single scratch can wipe out a lot, unfortunately. Good luck with reconstructing things. *wry grin* And you may want to consider setting up backups.

If you want to send me the portfolio I can take a look. I have some experience with the Zip format, having implemented code to create and extract from it. No guarantees, but it may be worth a look.

@Duggan, methinks that shall be standard practice from now on as this is the second time this has happened to me, although it was a year or so apart and that was because Windows NEEDED to update suddenly and without warning.

@Toblakai, I do not mind sending the .por over to you that has the PCs in it that I am more concerned about if you do not mind taking a stab at it.

I took a look, the entirety of both files just consist of the Null character, there is unfortunately no data at all in either file.