Regular Character File Corruptions
 

https://i.ibb.co/cN1Gxrf/Hero-Lab-Error-Message.png

I can't stand it anymore. I came on today to do session prep only to find my progress all gone because THIS showed up instead.

I'd have been fine with just one but, within this last week, this has happened two other times, with my primary character in another game AND the PC of one of the players in my game. Each required a total recreation from scratch.

Does anyone know of ANY way I can either fix this or prevent it from happening in the first place? I can't use this software if it breaks every other day.

Are your changes actually gone? Most of the time I've gotten this, my latest updates were still there and I just made a small change, saved it to a new file then backed out that change. Or when you put the changes back in, save it to a new file so it rewrites everything instead of updating an existing file.

Please report this as a bug to support@wolflair.com so that we can get more detailed information about what's going on, and get some of the files, so that we can inspect them, to see what's wrong with them.

The first thing I would try for this is to temporarily suspend any antivirus you have running, and see if you still get the errors then - it's possible that the antivirus program is interfering with the save or load process.

@Phrll: Everything is gone. Like, I log on, it yells at me in the form of that image, and then I'm left with a default level 0 classless, raceless character.

@Mathias: Tried that per your suggestion and, unfortunately, nothing changed.
I'll try shooting them an email to report the bug.

This may not be relevant, but did you get an error screen when you started Hero Lab? ...and then this error when you loaded a portfolio. (If you did, the system won't load anything but the basic demo files, which would explain a lot missing from Heroes.)

Have you done a drive check, or had problems with other programs/files on that drive?

Also, while possibly not helpful to you, the portfolio file is a ZIP file (assuming you've saved it in the last 6-7 years), and it includes HTML, XML, and TXT versions of all sheets that may be helpful to reconstruct (it's also possible that you may be able to relabel it as a ZIP file and run the repair process if not too many bytes are corrupted).

Update:
Support team got back to me. Basically said 'something had to have happened while you were saving or loading your files or your computer has some kind of nasty virus because this sh*t's sploded from the ground up and nothing short of a necromancer's bringing him back'.

So-uh, that blows.

Given that I have to use a laptop for everything I'm kinda hoping it's the former. -_-

Oof... did changing the extension and attempting to open it as a ZIP file help at all?

Renaming it into a zip file and trying to open it was the first thing I did when I got the bug report and the saved file - no luck - it's not recognized as a zip file.