Restoring save data after "Reset Data" is accidentally selected.

[Phantom_Oracle]

(DO NOT START A NEW GAME, I'M NOT SURE IF THIS PROCESS WILL WORK ONCE A NEW GAME HAS BEEN STARTED)

My nephew, whom I allow to play games using my Steam account, accidentally deleted all his progress on Castle Crashers by using the option "Reset Data" in Players Statistics so now all his characters are Level 1 with no money or pets. I was in the room
with him so he told me as soon as it happened. I have never encountered this before, who puts a Reset Data option in a game frequented by kids? I didn't yell at him though, he is 6 and genuinely sorry and sad to see all his hard work gone. However, I
did lecture him on the dangers of agreeing to something without reading the prompt screen (or at least asking me). Afterwards I set to work on restoring his lost data.
After googling "Restore Castle Crashers Data on Steam" all I could find where people being catty toward one another, a Behemoth representative stating that there was no way for Behemoth to help with the data restore issue and answers to how to restore on the XBOX 360. Overall we were screwed.

That was completely unacceptable to me, as anyone who has been on the internet
in the last 15 years knows, even when something is deleted it is still roaming around somewhere.

Somewhere along the way I came across "How to delete Steam Cloud Files". Personally, I have never thought about my Steam Cloud files, then again I'm only ever on Steam on my personal gaming computer. Steam Cloud Files are save files that Steam uploads onto its Cloud service (this option is turned on by default when you use Steam) so gamers have the ability to play their games on multiple computers and save their progress no matter what computer they use.
According to what I read not everyone is trilled with these Cloud files and have tried and failed to delete them. One of the reasons is that the Cloud files override the local save files on your computer so if the cloud fails to sync, your progress is not saved properly.

Even if I found the local save file on my computer and modified it to before the reset, the cloud would just come in and "update" that local file to whatever save information was stored in it. So the cloud save data is considered the newer data and if it sees that the local save file does not match its information it'll "update" it.
That's when it hit me, I needed to modify the Cloud File to before the reset so that the pre-reset saves would trickle down to my local save files (Independence Day, anyone) , so I set to work on finding it.

I came across a post titled "Can I find out what data is in the Steam Cloud for my games ..." (http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/146644/can-i-find-out-what-data-is-in-the-steam-cloud-for-my-games) while googling "View Steam Cloud Files". Someone was interested in simply knowing what files the Steam Cloud held about their games. Someone replied with the following...

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<Steam install folder>\userdata\<Steam ID>\<Application ID>\remotecache.vdf

Steam install folder: Defaults to "C:\Program Files\Steam" on Windows. You might have placed it elsewhere when you installed Steam.

Steam ID: If you only ever logged into one Steam account, you will only have one folder in the userdata folder which corresponds to your Steam ID. If not, you can find it in various ways.
One way is using http://steamidfinder.com/.

Application ID: You can find this by looking at the URL of the game's page on the Steam store, or use a service like http://steamdb.info/apps/ (you could also do reverse lookups by searching for the appid there).
Understanding the Steam Cloud index files

Here is an example of the save file sync settings for my Torchlight game:

"41500"
{
"saves.cmp"
{
"root" "0"
"size" "41558"
"localtime" "1327594410"
"time" "1327594409"
"remotetime" "1327594409"
"sha" "eae12f0e95dc5d5c65c18cd2991eb04d54714f30"
"syncstate" "1"
"persiststate" "0"
"platformstosync2" "-1"
}
}

As you can see, the file in question is named "saves.cmp". It will be located in a folder specified by the "root" setting. I haven't researched on all possible locations, but "0" indicates that the file is located in a folder named "remote" in the same folder as the index file and "2" indicates your documents folder in Windows.

All you then need to do is go find the files specified by the index files :). This method is all manual, but I believe it answers your question.

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Log off of Steam and close first.

When I downloaded Steam for the first time, I saved it onto my C: drive (though now I download my games onto another drive). I went to "My Computer" "Local Disk (C:)" "Program Files (x86)" "Steam" "userdata"
Here I found 4 folders of seemingly random numbers. These were the Steam ID that thread talked about and I didn't know which was the one I needed so I used the site they mentioned, http://steamidfinder.com/ and had to input each file name one by one into the search box. That site gives you some options as to how to input your data, I typed the first option http://steamcommunity.com/id/<customURL> (replacing the customURL with the file name, keep the brackets). That should have given me the Steam ID of someone who has used my computer (there are 3 of use who use it) but it gave me the info of some random Steam user who has not logged on in forever. I typed in the second file in the "userdata" folder and the same user popped up, same for the third and fourth folders. I don't know who this guy is, I'll have to look into this.

Since that didn't help me I looked up Castle Crasher's Application ID (which was the next step anyway) using http://steamdb.info/apps/
The result was "204360". I clicked on every file in "UserData" until I found a folder called "204360" (here's my path C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\108133304\204360)
That folder contained "remotecache.vdf". I used Notepad to open it and after using "Enter" to make it look like the example above I saw this:

"204360"

{
"cc_save.dat"

{
"root" "0"

"size" "1600"

"localtime" "1422783602"

"time" "1422783601"

"remotetime" "1422783601"

"sha" "0734b9ec132271d8203228578649c8533c6f5861"

"syncstate" "1"

"persiststate" "0"

"platformstosync2" "-1"
}
}



So now I had to find something called "cc_save.dat". As mentioned by the example above " ...It will be located in a folder specified by the "root" setting. I haven't researched on all possible locations, but "0" indicates that the file is located in a folder named "remote" in the same folder as the index file..."

And sure enough the "204360" folder had a folder called "Remote" with "cc_save.dat" saved within it.

P.S. I did type in "cc_save.dat" into the Start--Search Box but it didn't find it.

I right-clicked on "cc_save.dat" and selected "Restore Previous Versions (make sure your internet is turned on). I make system restore points whenever I do anything big on my computer so I hoped beyond hope that it would work on this file. Sure enough, I got a list of previous versions of this file. I clicked on one from a few days ago (before the reset), clicked "Copy" and a "Copy Items" dialog window popped up. I went right back
to the "remote" file. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\108133304\204360\remote
and clicked Copy. Another window popped up warning me that there was already a file named "cc_save.dat" in that folder and that if I was sure I wanted to replace it. I clicked "Copy and Replace". Now I was back in the "cc_save.dat Properties"; I clicked "Okay".

I logged back into Steam and started "Castle Crashers".

I went into "Player Statistics".
Moment of truth, I held my breath.
BOOM! all previous levels, weapons, pets and money were back!! It worked! I closed everything, logged back in just to check and sure enough everything is still there.
By restoring the Cloud File to a pre-reset version, it did not match the local save file information. The Cloud file then replaced the local save version to before the reset.



I did this 20 minutes ago (1:45 am February 2nd, 2015) and was so excited I wanted to share it with all of you, just in case something like this happens to anyone else.
This worked for me because I backup my system on the regular basis and I had a very recent "Previous Version" available to me (from January 28th).
You may not be able to recover all your progress but it's still better than having to start EVERYTHING from level 1 again.

I sincerely hope this helps anyone else out there restore their hard earned progress.

[76561198171709241]

What was he even messing around in the character statistics menu for anyway? If he wanted to play the game then I don't see why he would've gone poking around in there, much less be clicking buttons that say "reset," and even give you a warning before following through so you have the opprotunity to hesitate. I understand he's six but they say curiosity killed the cat; today it reset a six year old's save.

[Phantom_Oracle]

He has multiple characters on Castle Crashers, he uses the statistics menu to see which character has what weapon and pet and so forth. Also, I don't think he's ever encountered the word "reset". I agree that he shouldn't be poking in things he doesn't understand but if he doesn't how will he ever know things? I took apart two of my families desktops when I was in my early teens and ended up making them unusable but that taught me a lot more than if I had just read a book on it. I'm not going to discourage his curiosity I just want him to be more careful. Also, the rest of that saying goes "but the satisfaction brought him back", I got his saves back.

[sergiu]

Thanks.This helped me a lot

[Lindsay @ The Behemoth]

Oh, awesome!! Thanks for sharing -- we'll make sure to direct people to your post so they can give your method a try if they experience a similar problem!

[Phantom_Oracle]

Happy to help!

[Mika]

My little brother had the same problem. He cleared his data by error and he start crying asking me for help. Thanks to you he restore his data. Thank you a lot.

[Phantom_Oracle]

Kids, right? Glad he got his stuff back!

[ElranLuz]

Thanks

[Nikao]

Man, rly thanks about it..u saved my life on this. My cousin haved reseted all my game data and i was with 2 caracthers level 99. Rly man, great job :3

[Soup]

well the game is recommended from 16 years old and this is probably one of the reasons theres an age limit

[Phantom_Oracle]

0_o and Call of Duty is rated Mature, does that stop 9 year olds?

[Phantom_Oracle]

To everyone else, you're welcome :D

[Vered]

k

[MuffinsBlock]

I wish you were more concise and got to the point instead of talking about the progress of how you did it. Although, I thank you for even having the time to do it.
As I was panicking, trying to reload my previous data, I took the time to read your guide (I am a slow reader). You could have just said to go to the cc_save.dat immediately as I was actually following your every step (including the files you were looking at). The long period of time ended up auto saving and I was unable to retrieve my data when I got to the last part of "restoring previous versions." However, now I know what to do the next time this happens,.. So yeah, thanks anyways.

[Megas]

wat