A big thank you from my side. All of my settings were gone suddenly, I don't know why. But thanks to your automatic backups I could restore all of it in 5 minutes. Needless to say I copied the backups to a USB stick for safety too. Thanks again!

From time to time we see users post that their Sim Commander settings have disappeared.

By researching these reports, we've learned that this can happen in the following cases:

User Error

Sim Commander settings are stored in your Documents\Sim Commander 4 folder. Sometimes users delete this folder without realizing its importance.

User Error During Uninstall of Software

When you uninstall Sim Commander, it will ask you if you want to remove temporary and settings files. If you say yes, it will delete your settings files in the Documents\Sim Commander 4 folder.

OneDrive Sync Issues or Conflicts

Some users have OneDrive enabled for their Documents folder. This can lead to a variety of issues, especially if you sync the Documents folder to multiple PC's. We've also had a few reports where users had OneDrive enabled on their Documents folder unbeknownst to them. It seems that some installations of Windows 10 may do this although we've never seen this ourselves.

Poorly Behaving Hard Disk Drivers At PC Shutdown

If you shutdown your PC while Sim Commander is still running, we attempt to save our settings files to disk before the PC fully shuts down. In rare cases it is believed that some hard drive drivers don't fully flush their cache to physical disk before the shutdown causing a corrupted or half written Sim Commander settings file.

In any of these cases, when Sim Commander starts, if it doesn't see all of its settings files in the Documents\Sim Commander 4 folder it will bring up the initial setup wizard to help you recreate them.

In all cases, whether the settings loss is the fault of the user or some system/driver issue, this can be quite frustrating.

We have no ability to ensure that the ever-changing Windows, driver and sync  environments are stable. Starting with Sim Commander 4.2.30.0, due to be released in August 2021, Sim Commander will automatically take backups of your settings and provide a backup/restore UI.

This is expected to provide sufficient protection against all possible system configurations and user mistakes, getting users back on track quickly.