While playing Sims 2, one of my Sims asked his beloved over to his Sim house - her son was in school. He married her right there on the spot, but somehow the child didn't transfer from their previous home. Is there any way to 'go back' -revert to a prior time? I saved not realizing he wasn't included till school time came and went. And no he's not in the neighborhood Sim area.
Also, I saved the packaged lot when she, the boy, and their cat moved in to their lot. I went to my lot folder and somehow the game erased him from the packaged lot too, which was created three days ago.
Is there any folder or way to erase this save- go back and make a change a log, revert, etc.? Any suggestions would be most appreciated!

If you have a previous backup of the game, you can use that. When your sim married the new sim, you should have gotten a screen showing who would be moving in with your female sim, I'm not sure why that didn't happen to you.

I'm not sure how much help it will be, but I have used Inge's teleporter to locate missing sims in the past.
http://www.simlogical.com/sl/Sims2P...Teleporters.htm
Even though his mother is married, there's a chance that the son is listed under her previous last name. If you find the kid's name, teleport him to the lot and then add him to the household again.

Wait, you packaged a lot with sims in it? That may be the source of the problem. Packaging inhabited lots tears up character files, which corrupts the neighborhood. Visible results may be immediate, or take months to develop; but they are unpredictable. Your problem may well be a symptom of it, if I understand correctly what you did.

Your best bet is to delete the packaged lot from your lot folder and restore from a backup older than the incident, replaying the marriage. If you don't have a backup, and don't wish to abandon the hood yet, but patch it up and keep playing as long as you can, it could get complicated and will probably require editing tools, such as SimPE or SimBlender.

Poor kid. You didn't invite him to his own mother's wedding and he thought he wasn't wanted anymore!

Depending on your operating system, you may have "Previous Versions", which effectively creates on-the-fly backups. It's available in Windows 7 and, I think, some other Windows versions. Go to My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods, right click on the neighbourhood concerned (e.g. N001 for Pleasantview) and see if there's a "Previous Versions" tab. If there is, you can restore from the most recent version before your problem. (Before you do this make a manual back-up of that neighbourhood - just in case!)



It's best to make frequent backups for just this sort of eventuality, but Previous Versions can be a life-saver if you don't, and sometimes, even if you do keep backups, you can find a more recent version in Previous Versions than your last backup.

But I wouldn't recommend it to do this way. You need the neighbourhoodmanager.package to be corresponding to the hoods. I blew up my Strangetown this way so my sims got memories about sims that weren't part of the actual version of the hood

You can restore your NeighborhoodManager.package file from Previous Versions in exactly the same way as the neighbourhood folder.

You can delete the NeighborhoodManager.package file and the game will make a new one.

If you moved the inhabited lot to the Lots and Houses bin, as Peni said, then you might want to check the last two links in my signature below.

Actually, packaging a lot with sims is completely safe. It doesn't destroy your neighborhood at all.

The problem is moving occupied lots to the Lot Bin. That will instantly corrupt your neighborhood.

Note that installing occupied lots into a neighborhood will usually destroy the neighborhood, regardless of whether you packaged the lot or moved the occupied lot to the Lot Bin. You might get lucky if the family had no connections with anything else in the neighborhood, but most people aren't lucky. It doesn't matter whether the lot is installed back into the original neighborhood, or into a new neighborhood.

The first thing that I would try is the teleporter. If you can find the sim, just move him in. Problem solved.

If that doesn't work (ie, you can't find the missing sim), then your neighborhood is probably corrupted. Restoring from backup is your only option.

Thank you everybody for all your suggestions and input. First, there were/are a few things I didn't mention in my haste to post. 1: the game crashed when 'the marriage' occurred. So I had to reboot. 2: The computer is Windows 8 desk top. I haven't had any problems playing the game,( re: crashes b4 this one). other than the fact that the mouse cannot place objects; which is a real pain. It isn't the mouse per se, I've tried other mice, it's something in the os I suppose.
This morning what I did, perhaps against better judgement, I copied the neighborhood and character files to the desk-top. Then, in the game files, I removed all the files that were associated with that time in the game '9:50 p.m'.
I thought the desk-top files were safe! I didn't know that they would be altered via Maxis or Windows. When I went to the desk-top saved files they were 'altered' to match the deleted files in the game. So I lost mucho, not only the boy but several occupied lots in the game.
I said a few choice words, closed the game. On the second boot, everything changed, but not awesomely so. The occupied lots were back. The boy was standing outside the lot house, just like he should have been when I selected him @ 9:50 p.m. The bad news is, everybody has lost all their hard worked for levels. And the 'new husband', he was special. He was one of those platinum Sims that are always platinum. Now they are mere characters you can create 50 times a day.
Last night I tried to download SimPE and for some reason the site won't allow me to download. The site says 'it's not available'. Maybe it can't work with Windows 8. (which should be re-named 'widows 8' - it's a killa for everybody who's not educated on operating systems)
Mootilda, I think the teleporter relies on Simpe? I'll have to check because I couldn't download it last night either.
So, the boy is back, but the characters at this point aren't even worth playing. In that I played the game with no 'alterations' or cheats when the crash happened, it appears to be a ' Maxis problem' with the crash, and surely Maxis has some way to make a revision?

I got SimPE installed . Now it's off to download the teleporter! thank you!

If the game crashes, depending on the circumstances, files can be damaged. But I really do think that the cause of the problem is the files that you deleted. The game doesn't make new files when you save, it changes the old ones - so you didn't just delete everything that happened after 9:50PM, you deleted every sim and lot that was involved in anything after 9:50PM. I dunno quite how they got restored, but I'm not at all surprised that they were corrupted.

It's also very strange that the copies were edited. You are logged in as an administrator, right?

What you believe that you're seeing is very very unlikely. If you have a backup, then nothing will alter the backup when you change the original.

It's far more likely that you aren't actually copying all of the files, but are instead just creating a shortcut or link to the original files. That means that there is only one copy of the files, and when you change them you are changing your only copy.

To make a proper backup, you need to have a copy of each and every file.

At this point, it really sounds like you've corrupted your neighborhood. You can't just delete files; all of the files in the neighborhood's folder (and all subfolders) work as one unit.

The game crashed last night. No files were deleted or touched in any way possible prior to the crash.
The crash, btw., was the culmination of 5 full days (of sometimes agonizing (due to Maxis constant interjections) work- training mom and boy to almost half of their necessary motives or aspirations, what-ev, and teaching kitty right from wrong as well as training 2 learned behaiviers,. building their new home, while simoultaniously romancing mom and the 'new dad'. The mom and boy also made friends with those two neighborhood black dogs (Dakota and whaz-her name) with the yellow eyes - not an easy task for a boy. The new home to-be had a large-ish lot wherein I had hoped to give the dogs a nice yard if I could 'make friends' and adopt. And the zenith was to get them over to the large-ish lot and a dad with platinum- always platinum motives. At the zenith the game crashed...and I quit playing except to visit the lot in question only to find the boy was missing. Then I quit playing after that, so no other lot was involved.

This morning, the morning after, is when I removed files associated with that Sim time, 9:50 p.m. The back-up files placed on the desk-top, no less, changed right along with the game files, when I deleted the time files in game, then went to the desk top files they were duplicated.to the deleted files in game - how that was possible I don't have an answer.
Now I have SimPE ( I hope there's a tutorial) and I've downloaded the teleporter! This time, however, the back-up files went into a thumb drive! Yes I was logged in as administrator. Windows 8 is pickier than Vista and anything prior.

If you change one set of files, and that automatically changes a completely different set of files, then you haven't got a real backup. There may be another explanation, but the 99% explanation is that you don't have two copies. You only have one copy. It is very likely that the thing on your desktop is a link to the original location.

Crashes can destroy files. That's why it's a good idea to backup. The things that you've done to solve the problem sound like they've made things worse. At this point, it seem unlikely that you'll be able to fix all of the problems. Never delete individual files from inside of the neighborhood folder.

The first thing that you should do is to learn to make a proper backup. Here's a FAQ:
http://simswiki.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Back_Ups

Try making a backup, then running the game. If any files in your backup have changed, then you've done something wrong, because backups do not change because the original changes.

It's a hard lesson learned. With just a few lot exceptions, I lost all the occupied lots. Oh they're still there, but the Sims inside have lost all their relationships and achievements. I guess there's no going back now. Thank you for the link. -Going there now.

As Mootilda says, it looks as if your "backup" on the desktop is just a shortcut to the original files. Since it also looks as if you have deleted some essential files from your neighbourhood, it does look as if, in the absence of a working backup, your game is lost. Before you give up completely, try using Previous Versions as described in my post #6 above. I have no experience of Windows 8, but I would be very surprised if the Previous Versions feature was not present in Windows 8. Basically it uses otherwise unused disk space to keep "on-the-fly" backups. If you have Windows automatic updates turned on (as most people do), then Previous Versions will save backup copies of your files every time there is a significant update to Windows -- usually every few days.

You might look at my my posts in the How to start over? thread back in August, where I described it in more detail.

[EDIT] I don't think you've got much to lose in trying it. DO try to make frequent proper backups in future! Good Luck!

It's been a while since I last dealt with Win. 8, but to my memory, I don't think there is a "Previous Versions" feature. Then again, I switched to Win. 7 two months ago, so I could be wrong.

We all feel for you. It's terrible to lose a neighborhood that you've worked so hard on.

You are right. Checking the other inhabited lots, the ones saved (not missing) are all lunatics with no relationships, etc. The rest of the lots are devoid of Sims - only their cats remain. This was the Veronaville site. Mostly I like to build and furnish.
One day I decided to revamp the Summerdream (?)house, and I got hooked. Then I started changing their faces, getting rid of the masks and dressing them nicely. Upping their grades, relationships, in all the lots. Moved them all to Sim houses with indoor pools in order to give them their needed 'fun' fix via the pool slide. Added 4 new occupied lots, and was really enjoying the challenge. As we are only who we are, my Sims creations are my own -that's all I can do and they all tend to look and act like each other, iow.s. It was fun playing the Maxis Sims created by someone else with their point of view. I have had this game since it originated and only now gave Veronaville a second look. After all these years. All the characters are gone that you have on your c.d. for Veronaville.
Checking Pleasantville, etc., none of the Maxis created neighborhoods and associated lots have the richness or quantity of Veronaville. I will miss the game and neighborhood.

You can always reset the hood and start over.

And/or do the same thing in other neighborhoods. They might surprise you.

Thank you so much. I didn't see a previous version tab. The screen shot you posted doesn't look at all like my n.h. file. It just doesn't appear to be there, else I don't know where to locate it it.

Peni, how do you do that? -reset the n.h.? Speak slowly and use small words not associated with technical minds.