Help me!!! [Restoring XWE's backups]

I was making a map and made a whole lot of progress. I was changing the music with XWE, when all in the sudden the music returned to the original Doom 2 music. I added the music file again, started it up only to see that the map did not load anymore (!). Confused as I was I opened Doombuilder to see the horrible truth. EVERYTHING WAS GONE! The error list was incredibly long and said that it was unused or something and deleted. Instead there were 2 drawn lines I never drew. I didn't know wether to go into a rage status and smash the nearest wall to pieces until my hand broke or to cry or to scream.

I cannot find anything to turn this back and my only hope are files like <wadname>.wad.001.bak

Are these like back up files to go back a few steps? If yes, how do I do that? I really, really feel in the need of help now, so please help me! Anyone!

1) Rename the latest backup file to .WAD
2) ?
3) Profit!

Thanks, but I figured out myself that the files with the same name as the wad will work if you just remove the backup extension. Thanks anyway!

XWE is notorious for corrupting wads that are being accessed by other programs at the same time. You may have even had your wad open with two instances of XWE at the same time, which IIRC will cause the same problem. XWE is okay to use as long as you are extremely certain that it is not already open. It's good to see you haven't done anything silly like disable the backups though. :)

You may have to go back to the second or third most recent backup before finding one that's not corrupted, so it'd pay to rename them sequentially, with <wadname>.wad.001.bak becoming <wadname>_001.wad and so on.

Are these like back up files to go back a few steps?

XWE creates a backup when a modified wad is closed, how many steps it takes you back depends on the extent of the changes made between opening and closing the wad.

Yes, I did not use the most recent one.

Whenever I use XWE, I make a new copy of the WAD before even using it with XWE, just in case.

Yup, I learned from what happened and do so too.

Why bother? XWE does that for you.

Yes, but I delete those files all the time because they annoy me by just being there ^^. I'd have to rename it and I don't like doing that (wow, most stupid excuse I've ever used).