About 3 weeks ago in a brilliant stroke of genius, I ended off one of my weekends by deleting every single save file for my Xbox 360 retail games and Xbox LIVE Arcade games, including my back ups on my Memory Unit!
How did I achieve such a cornucopia of awesomeness, you ask? Well, about 2 weeks before that, I noticed some Achievements I had yet to unlock weren't showing up properly on my Dashboard, and I had read that Recovering your Gamertag could resolve this issue. Being riddled with OCD, I had to give this a try, but I'd heard some horror stories about the recovery feature and as a precaution, I decided to move my Profile to my Memory Unit and leave it there for two weeks in case something went wrong.
After moving my current Profile, I performed an Account Recovery on my HDD and everything worked perfectly. 2 weeks later, having experienced no issues what-so-ever, I decided it was time to remove that back up Profile on my Memory Unit.
I had just gone through removing some redundant back up save games from Fallout 3 when I selected that Profile and on complete automatic, I selected the "Delete Profile and Items" option. You see, "Delete Profile and Items" is in the exact same spot that I was clicking to remove those Fallout 3 saves, and of course, what does the "Items" part mean? You guessed it! Saved games!
But wait, there's more! Since the profile on my Memory Unit that was now being deleted carried the same association as the main Profile I had recovered, as well as linking it not only to all my back up save files, but also my main save files on my HDD, I could only stare dumbly as my Xbox 360 erased every single save file I had made in about 3 years of gaming.
Jackass unlocked!
Furious at my own stupidity, I did an exceptional Darth Vader impression, and then scrambled to contact Xbox Support to see if they had a warranty out on customer stupidity. Apparently dumbassedness is not covered under the Xbox 360 Warranty.
So, there you have it: all my save files gone. The good news is it wasn't anywhere near as crushing and final as I originally thought. I was able to recover my Gamertag again easily, and all of my Achievements as well as most of the unlocked levels and collectibles in the majority of my games are all tied to that, and my Themes and unlocked Gamer Pics were all there to.
Most of my games I would have restarted upon playing again anyway, so the real losses were my current Fallout 3 character, 30 hours down the crapper, the lack of a Mass Effect character to port into the sequel this winter, and to a lesser extent, the loss of my current The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion character. Otherwise, it was all bearable, so thank you to whoever at Xbox decided to tie so much of your gaming progress to your actual Gamertag. For example, I can load up Halo 3 or Gears of War 2 and select any Campaign mission, since I've already beaten them and this progress was tied to my Gamertag.
So the moral of the story? 1) Don't listen to OCD impulses. 2) Make sure you're clicking "A" on the right option, and 3) if you're going to delete a copy of your Profile, do so from someone else's console.
4 comments:
Hello,
I was googling a possible issue with the Xbox 360 deleting saved games. After reading this, I figured out why all of them are gone! I moved my gamer profile to a memory card so I could bring it to a friends house and play Modern Warfare 2 special ops and get credit for the stars and all. I don't recall exactly what I went through, but I was prompted as to whether I wanted to delete just the profile or the profile and all the items. I chose the items because I was under the impression it was a duplicate of the one on my hard drive, apparently deleting it got rid of the profile on the hard drive as well as the memory card.
I was upset due to many hour put into Fallout 3, Oblivion, Mass Effect, and recently Dragon Age and Borderlands. Very easily deleted over 200 hours of save games.
I unlocked Jackass myself unfortunately, just know that you are not alone.
-Nathan
Gamertag: Flibbert
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