Gothic 1 tends to crash on me but, while annoying, doesn't prevent me from just opening the game back up. At least until today. Today, the game crashed and when I started it back up my resolution was messed up and my saves (all fourteen of them) are missing. I looked in the Saves folder already and I'm not seeing anything there.

How did my game lose my settings and all of my saves?

More importantly, how do I get them back?

By the way, I am running Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

To clarify, when you say your Saves folder is empty are you looking at the one in the install folder? That folder isn't used on Vista and 7 (unless you've installed outside Program Files and/or disabled UAC)--your saves will instead be in the following folder:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Gothic

The path will differ from this on your end if you changed the install folder. You can copy part or all of this example path to jump directly to that folder.

If you're already looking in VirtualStore and still don't see your saves try checking its Previous Versions. Right click the Saves folder, choose "Restore previous versions", and wait for the list to load. Look in the folders it provides (from newest to oldest) until you find one that has your saves, then click Restore and it will put it back.

You can use this same feature to restore individual files such as the settings file.

Thanks for the detailed info. I had seen fragments of a post about finding the virtualstore but couldn't seem to find it on my computer. That said, my saves are there but Gothic still won't recognize them or my settings.

I'm glad my data isn't lost but how do I get the game to use it again?

Hmmm... try deleting the Saves folder in the install folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Gothic, or wherever you installed it to) to see if that makes the saves show up.