Save File Missing

[Blackstar]

I've been playing Xenoblade Chronicles using Dolphin and it occasionally freezes up. Wasn't ever a really big deal to me as I saved pretty often. But this last freeze was different, my computer went on the fritz and it took forever to kill the task. When I restarted Dolphin and went to load up my Xenoblade save, there was nothing there!

I have an old save state from the first hour I played the game that is still sitting there, but I have no idea what happened to the regular game save. Anybody know if there's a way to get it back? Starting over after pouring some 30 hours into it...will just be absolutely brutal.

[skid]

Right click on the game icon in the game list and select "Open Wii Save folder" and see if there are files in the folder that pops up. Double check that it is pointing to the right place. If there are files there and they are in the right place, you may be SOL. If there are no files in folder, search your hard disk for the files.

Bit late, but if you were to have used the latest development revision of Dolphin (3.5-1380) available from the Download link at the top of this page, the game freezes might not have occurred.

[Blackstar]

There are three files in there. Monado01, Monado02, Monado03. I turned off hide file extensions and they didn't have any type of file name.

I'll try the latest build once I know for certain of my predicament can be resolved or not. The only reason I used this old one was because it's supposed to fix a lot of the sound issues with the game.

At any rate, what is the save file called? I'd imagine it's a DAT or BIN file.

[skid]

Monado01, Monado02, Monado03 are the save files. I think you may be SOL, unfortunately. There's a tiny chance you might be able to salvage it if you have made a save state.

[Blackstar]

Why would there be three though? I only ever made one save at a time. Also, if the save files are there, why can't they be recovered?

[skid]

Does the date and time of the save file correspond to the time you last made a successful save or is it the time of the doomsday crash? Did you save a new game after finding that your saves have disappeared? Have you tried searching your hard disk for other files named Monado01 ? There might be another folder where your real save files are.

Games sometimes detect that the saves have been corrupted and wipe the save and start it again. That could be the reason why the files are there.

When I spend hours on a game, I backup the save folder periodically. Save corruption occur sometimes - both in Dolphin and on the real console.

[Blackstar]

I can't tell if the time was the crash or my last successful save. I'll try looking for the save files elsewhere, perhaps I'll get lucky. Though it's not looking promising at this point. I only recently started using Dolphin, so I wasn't aware that data corruption was such a common occurrence. Guess if I can't get it fixed, then I'll just start over and have my cloud service backup the Wii save folder every hour.

Thank you for trying to help me out. I do appreciate the effort.

[Garteal]

It's not that common. I've played through Xenoblade, (and quite some games mind you) and never experienced such a thing.
I think that Xenoblade, as skid states above, is one of those games that wipes the savegame that is corrupted.

Could you upload your save files so I can take a look at them?

[LordVador]

Could you upload a copy of your whole Wii folder too?

[Blackstar]

Sure thing guys. I uploaded them to my cloud service, you can access it from this link:
https://copy.com/Zn2fqLzJQoQy

The path to the saves is \title\00010000\53583450\data

Also I did a search of the Dolphin folder and couldn't find any other things labeled "Monado" except for one of the folders from the high res texture pack I downloaded.