Topic: Problems loading games

Hi, yesterday I had trouble with my PS4 . I ended up having to rebuild database etc. My games are all saved onto my external hard drive.
Now it’s shows my trophy’s and game progress correctly but when I go to load my games they all start from the beginning . Does anyone have any help what to do or have I lost almost everything. Thanks

@Dougieb43 It's possible that your local saved data has been lost. Do you have PS Plus? If so, have you ever uploaded your save data to the cloud? Because you'll need to download it back to your console in order for it to work with whatever you're currently playing.

If not, and if it wasn't manually backed up anywhere else (your external HDD or a USB, for example) then you should check your console's settings menu for "Application Saved Data Management" and select "Saved Data in System Storage" (it'll ask you to copy or delete; picking either one will show you the list of what's still there). There's a slight possibility that it'll still be listed, but has been corrupted by whatever happened to your PS4 yesterday, at which point... yeah, sorry.

@RogerRoger . Thanks for the help, I’ll give it a go later on

Hi, I clicked on saved data in system storage and it lists 3 games that we checked yesterday to see if anything was saved , all seemed to have created a file yesterday. I assume there for that all previous copies have been overwritten/lost .

I assumed everything would have backed up automatically to the external hard drive. With a PS4 is this not the case ??.

@Dougieb43 — your saved data is always saved to the internal hard drive, regardless of where the game is installed. you can export it to a usb drive, but it can't the same one games are installed on as far as i know (i moved my external HDD to the PS5, so i can't test this - but it doesn't work on PS5). if you have PS+ it should automatically upload to the online storage.

in my experience, rebuilding the database does not affect local game saves - my PS4pro regularly had to do this when it went into rest mode while the external drive was still connected, and i never lost any saves. as part of your reset, did you recreate any of the accounts on the PS4? - if an account was removed/deleted, all the data associated with the accounts including local application saves get removed as well.

@leucocyte hi , thanks for your help in clarifying things . I dont recall creating a new account when I reset the system.
Unfortunately I don’t have PlayStation plus.
Looks like I have lost my game saves but I will know in future what to do. Thanks again .