Today I hit alt+f3 in game and the overlay came up and froze my user input. The game was still working in the background. The cursor was locked and I could tab around but not do anything else so I hard-reboot my PC. Well, I load up wow again and half my addons are wiped. Some are as they were, about half, but the remaining half are totally reset.
Meaning countless hours of hundreds of weakaura creations (all self made) are gone. Then there are others like threatplates, gone. GladiatorLosa (minor) gone. Bartender and keybinds among a few others seem to be working totally normally though.
So, I guess the question is, how do I fix this? The last “backup” I guess you could say is from over a year ago when I transferred some stuff to a laptop. Never in a million years did I think that so much data could be wiped from literally nothing. How on earth does rebooting your PC make the game think “Ill just wipe out half of your settings, but leave the other half alone and also leave in-game settings alone.”
Is there a backup of this anywhere by default? Anyway to recover any of this? I see some files in the SavedVariables folder under the account name but when I import them into the characters savedvariables it is not doing anything. Which is a little scary because Ive used that before to transfer settings between accounts and its supposed to work…
you can take a look in WoW install_retail_\WTF\Account\AccountID\Server\Toon\SavedVariable
and see if any of your addon.lua files are a lot smaller than addon.lua.bak.
other than that, you’re probably SoL my friend. let this be a lesson to make more frequent backups.
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fortunately i did a little season of mastery and when i saved my data to hose savevariables it backed it up…3 months ago but thats better than 2.5 years lost lol.
Hello. your problem is similar to mine, lost or vanished Add-On data, in my case, due to a UI reset.
My UI was reset back to stock, and add-ons were reset back to the original fresh-install condition. (or did I have to re-install them?)
Installing an add-on is no problem, like you, my loss is the set-up time.
The reset was a last-ditch thing, recommended by Blizz tech, I knew it would fork me and my add-ons, what I didn’t know is that it wouldn’t work, is that not funny! 
The weekly reset fixed things…
So, I’m asking: What files should I be backing up to preserve my add-ons? These files, would be character specific, right? at least sometimes?
I could get to this, but don’t understand how it is supposed to be. smaller, larger?
the WTF folder is where addons store their preferences for each character. for each addon you have installed, you’ll have the addon.lua file, which is the current state of that addon (profiles, settings, etc.) There will also be a file addon.lua.bak, which has an older version of the contents of that file. If your addons are missing data, you can try replacing the contents of the .lua file with the contents of the .bak file. If you notice that the .lua is a noticably smaller than the .back, it’s possible that some data was deleted, but is still in the backup.
Thank you. It may be that I still have this data. Bak.= back-up?
I am going to look for files older than my reset date, but not by much~! 
There may be two* AddonName.lua/AddonName.lua.bak files
* 1 global + 1 for each character.
“Global” addon settings under:
WTF\Account\[account name]\SavedVariables
Per character addon settings under:
WTF\Account\[account name]\[realm name]\[character name]\SavedVariables
This assumes that you’re dealing with non-ACE2 addons. Most of them keep player-specific date at the global level in an indexed table.
But in general this is correct.
The post assumes nothing… especially that.