My Sims are disappearing!

[FyrDragon]

I play on a Intel Mac Mini.  I only have the expansion packs up to Open For Business.  I haven't downloaded any new hacks/mods recently.  I have added custom hair, clothes, furniture, and recolors of Maxis items.  I played my Veronaville University yesterday with no problems.  Today I went into my Veronaville Bluewater Village to look at some recolors of clothing racks and to build a new store.  After I had built the new lot, I looked around and noticed that Chester Gieke and Jodie Larson and her brother were missing.  Their houses were still there, but now up for sale.  I went into my Downtown which was fine and went to a house where Chester Gieke had been visiting.  He wasn't there and my sim had a memory of meeting 'subject'  I use the Insimenator and used the Summon tool and paged through all the families, they all seemed to be there except those two families.  Then I changed neighborhoods and went to my custom neighborhood.  Everybody was missing!  I had no controllable sims (I don't know about townies, since I had no one to play) at all.  I quit the game and looked at the Neighborhood folders.  The amount of characters in my custom neighborhood folder was definitely less than it should have been.  One suggestion in a MATY thread was to delete the Neighborhood controller and let it respawn, so I tried that.  I went back into the game and looked at the University in Strangetown, everybody was there.  I tried Bluewater in Veronaville again, it took much longer than normal to load and when it loaded everybody was gone!  Then I loaded Downtown and everybody except one family was gone. When I visited that family the game seemed to think that I had just installed a new expansion pack!  Then I visited Veronaville and four families were missing.  In University the dormies from a new dorm that I added a few days ago were missing.  Everybody in my custom neighborhood is still missing.  

Please, does anybody have any suggestions?  I'm scared to go back into the game!  I do have a backup, but it's from a couple Sim weeks previous.  I'll back up what's left of my families right now, but is there any way to get them back?  Is this going to keep happening?  In my Characters folder for Veronaville there are now four "TempDBSegmentPackedFile_1197669711.tmp" which weren't there before.  I don't have anything on my computer to run regular Windows programs.

Please, any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Mi-chii]

Same thing kept happening to me, and my problem was a combo of two things: I had exceeded the downloads-limit (I believe, that for uni, it's only 2000, check the stickies), and I had a custom hood template I had downloaded that turn into fail when I installed a new EP.

So I did the steps to turn up the downloads-limit, and deleted the custom template, and it was all goodie

[FyrDragon]

Thanks for trying!  I never did figure out what had happened.  I ended up going back to my saved game, now I backup a little more frequently.  A lot of the things I read made it sound like it was related to OFB, so I got Pets!

[rosidbon]

I have the same problem with the disappearing families. It has been going on for so long now that i try to never get too attached to anyone in the game, because I know that sooner or later they are going to go. I have never found out why this should happen but I do suspect it is one of the horrid glitches that the two EPs Business and Pets have in them. They are the notorious EPs for causing all sorts of weird and insurmountable problems and I think I have had them all! I like to have all the EPs so that all downloads work in the game so I put up with the horrible annoying stuff that goes with having them , but if you want to be able to keep your families down through generations, I would suggest not putting either of these into your game.
The intel macs are also difficult with The Sims 2. I bought my daughter a new intel macbook with the newest OS and it won't allow me to put any expansion packs onto the game at all!!!! It will take the base game and play it but as soon as I install an expansion pack the message that I have to install the base game first comes up. V.V.V. annoying and I haven't managed to get to the bottom of this yet.

[Mi-chii]

rosidbon have you patched your game?

[FyrDragon]

I'm starting to feel like you, Rosidbon.  I had put my backup of my neighborhoods back in, then had problems again.  Then I added Pets and now I have Seasons and I think they might have added new problems.  I started having the game freeze in Bodyshop when I was switching from say makeup to face mask (even without any downloads in the game) just randomly, so every now and then I had to force quit and lo and behold I lost all my Sims again!  I decided to start over, uninstalled, reinstalled, just started a new custom neighborhood.  I was in Bodyshop, making a new family and the game crashed.  The next time I went in, it crashed on trying to load that neighborhood.  I took out all my downloads, slowly putting them back in, testing with a maxis neighborhood, go back to my custom neighborhood and all those sims are gone!  Argh!!!!

[BeosBoxBoy]

the reason it's happening is explained here: http://www.insimenator.org/showthread.php?t=70774

fixing it... well, I don't think there any real fix for it on the Mac platform, the resource demands are just too much for OSX

[FyrDragon]

Thanks, Beosboxboy.  I actually increased the file limit right after I got the game and University, around a year ago.  In my first (and only Veronaville) I actually hadn't played more than the original generation growing up and having kids.  I did however do a couple of things that might have helped the game stretch it's resources - I added a bunch of sims right off the bat and then added more along the way - both in CAS and with adding Nightlife and OFB.  I also resurrected the recently dead Montys' and Capps'.  Sigh.  Now I'm just trying to get rid of anything that might possibly cause the game to crash or freeze, so hopefully I won't have much corrupting any data.  It's those beautiful bodybuilders, I just can't help myself!