Hey folks, after trying to sign up and create a bug report on the "official" MSFS forums and realizing I'll have to wait a certain time there, I signed up here.

In the recent days (!), I've been installing City Update I. Days, because once you click update, you can't abort it any more, and if you haven't maxed out your download bandwith in the settings, you're out of luck.
However, after the update was finally installed today, I noticed that it wiped my whole community folder clean. Not even the community folder, it basically completely reset the whole simulator. All Microsoft-Asobo content, world updates, Maverick update etc, everything was removed. Does anyone have an explanation for this?

I'll have to redownload all world updates now, so PSA, always backup your Community folder and downloaded world updates before installing anything new from the Marketplace from Microsoft.

Maybe this will help save at least someone from this utter chaos.

The city update should have been 492 bytes once installed.
What has apparently happened to you must have been something else.

Yep, but after it started and said it would download the whole 99GB, there was no way to stop it unfortunately. This really is just to let all of you know that this can happen so you do a backup before and trying to find out if someone else had this issue, so we can troubleshoot so it won't happen again.

I would guess that you now have a second installation in the default location and that your original files are all still there in your chosen location.

Edited September 5, 20223 yr by Reader

CU1 was a tiny update (so small that I don't even remember its size) and made through the Marketplace. No need to touch anything else

When you boot up the sim, it looks to find all your content at the location specified in the last line of this file:

UserCfg.opt

which can be found here:

Microsoft store version

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache

Steam version

C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator

 

If you have MSFS installed at two locations this can cause issues similar to the OP's problem.

I would look on the C:\ drive for any folders named community or official. And see if there are two or one of these folders. If there's two then you probably have MSFS at least partially installed in two location. 

You want to tell MSFS which one of the locations to use, instead of the other one (ones).

You can do that by altering the last line in the UserCfg.Opt file (using notepad) to the desired path.

Alternately you can just boot up MSFS and when it  gets to the 'searching for updates' screen, then don't  proceed. Instead go to the path location down at the bottom of Searching For Updates in MSFS. And change it there.

You can always boot up MSFS and change the path again at Searching for Updates screen if something went wrong in doing any of this.