Finding Saved Games in Vista's Virtualstore
If you reset the game... how to restore your saved state.edited by Earl on Jul-02-2008
My son likes to play Gish on my computer. Well, after weeks of playing the game off and on, we had made progress in winning many of the maps. One day, he reset the game, losing all of our progress. It was by accident and he was very sad that we had to start over at the beginning of the game.
I told him not to worry, since my computer backs itself up
every night.
I would simply revert to yesterday's backup of the game, before he
reset it. If I had been running Windows XP, this would have been an
easy task. I would have simply gone to the folder:
C:\Program Files\Gish
... and restored the files in that folder, namely: gish.cfg, gish.his, and gish.pla.
Unfortunately, my computer is running Vista, so I couldn't find where Vista was hiding the game files! It's not in the expected folder shown above. After a bunch of reading online, I discovered that Vista has a virtualstore, where it causes many programs, including games, to think that they are saving their game state where they want to (in the programs folder), but in fact, Vista is tricking the program and is actually saving the game state in a hidden folder, in its virtualstore. I guess this is somehow making the computer safe from malware or viruses, but with a big trade off... because I can't easily find the files I need!
Here is how I finally got our previous day's version of the game restored:
1. Open up Backup and Restore center.
2. Restore Files. Be prepared to wait while the computer opens up the next couple windows.
3. Add folder
Look for this folder:
C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Gish demo
I bought the game after trying the demo, for some strange reason my saved files remain in the demo folder.
After restoring the files, all of our saved progress in the game was restored! We don't have to struggle through winning all those old maps again.
Ironically, the next day, my daughter reset another game on my computer: The Tuttles.
To restore the backed up game, I followed the same process above, finding a different folder instead:
C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\ProgramData\DivoGames\Tuttles
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