Steam Cloud assets going missing/moving to other users cloud#670

I have been plaugded by this issue for the past year and have had two specific situations were this has caused us major problems. There’s a lot going on here so I will do my best to explain the process.

In a nut shell. I have two clients with company steam accounts who host a public verions of thier game on the workshop. They both have a private versions of these mods used for interal testing. When working on these private versions they offten use thier personal steam account and upload new assets to thier own cloud and then load the save in the compnay account. All files are hosted via the steam cloud.

The issue are having is that sometimes these personal account will upload new assets to the mod (even though they are already in the cloud) into thier own cloud. When this happned Steam will eventual delete the assets from the orginal host cloud. Which in turn breaks all the url in all the versions of the mod. The new save file is also not swaping to the inavertaly newly uploaded url, but is still holding on to the original url.

I’m not sure it’s a factor but the personal accounts are set as contribuators to the mods.

In the past I have been able to replicate this issue by taking a image that is already in the steam cloud on another account and then reuploading that from local. When I tested this in the past it was almost instantanousely deleted from the orignal host account. I have seen it happen over a period of a day or two.

When these files go missing I have started having the other users check there steam cloud and we find all the missing assets located thier. I believe them when they all say that they never uploaded the files that had gone missing.

One client was able to resolve this issue by having all thier users use the company account and the issue went a way. However, my other client doesn’t have this opitions for reason I can get into if needed.

I am working with another moder to run isolted tests to see if we can cause assets to go missing.

This might help as well - Steam sees the files uploaded by different users as the same add dupicates thier url index name

These files in our test were uploaded with different names.

In the past, one thing I could do to prevent asset stealing was to edit the image it’s self. I would chagne a few pixels in the image and this would prevent the Steam Cloud from seeing them as the same.

Both steam accounts are on the local machine. In most situcations the users is using one windows account and logging in and out of the steam account. Is it possivle that they share the cloud data .bson since it’s not account specific? If i’m understanding this right.

I have a feeling it has something to do with how steam shares/stores user save data and .bson cloud file. Some how when both users have been logged into the same windows account things start getting crossed.

Might be worth looking into looking into what would cause TTS to send a message to delete a cloud file or is steam doing some type dupicate file clean up.

I just made a new discovery, I checked the cloud for the missing file and found that the link is actually still there but I’m guessing the file in the cloud is not.

http://cloud-3.steamusercontent.com/ugc/773992042030144456/380D3E556A98BD7BC6E30534AA7F340C0513AE5C/

We are no having issues patching these missing files. The new links are not working for all players. With mod caching off it will still load for some but not others. We have been testing the links exterally as well it other devices/browsers/locations and we are getting mixed results.

here is one of the links:
http://cloud-3.steamusercontent.com/ugc/773992042029510975/8939422DCB921888416DDEB81DD08F3C4CAA3756/

Thank you for you help in this. We are excited to get into game devlopment once we get our issues fixed.

Did you bot upvote this lol?

no lol, the develpoer and play testers are excited for the new updates they have coming but can’t play it until it’s fixed.

This issue is pretty much at fault with how Steam handles cloud files. They do a very poor job when you are logging into multiple Steam accounts and they end up overwriting the other accounts. What’s likely breaking here is the meta file that contains all the cloud files info, which is why sometimes old link might still work.

As a side note are they using family shared accounts, I have heard reports of that causing the issue.

It’s possible but it did happen to me back before I started using virtual machines for each of my clients and I didn’t use family shared accounts. From now on I am going to make sure that they understand it’s not a good idea to swap accounts.

Also I have a problem with files disappearing from the cloud. I have created more than 60 mods and recently for almost all of them the files broke.
About opening Modding/Cloud Manager and selecting any folder. I get a mass of error messages and corrupted files.

Is this a fixable problem on the part of support, or should I start creating mods, which took more than 2 years, from scratch ?

It is a steam issue for sure and there is no support for it. The only solution is to start over and use dropbox or host the files yourself. We tried google drive but it’s will ramdoly fail for some people but then work fine a few days latter.

if the files are still cached on your machine you could try this tool:
https://www.nexusmods.com/tabletopsimulator/mods/263

It will reupload missing files that are found in your local cache. The only problem is that you have to do it one file at a time. But I have seen the bug trigger on these uploads as well and the could go missing with in a few days. If you keep at it you might eventualy get the all recovered and stable.

Best of luck o/