Levels accidentally deleted?

I've been working on a level for a couple months now. It was (I think) about a hundred screens. Today, it disappeared. I opened the editor, and there was nothing there besides the starting position. It was as if the whole level got deleted. All the custom tilesets I had were still there, however. I looked in the folder and found that the map.bin was still there, and was 10 KB big. I then tried replacing the map.bin with the map.bin from another level. Nothing happened. I also tried to run it from the game and got the same big void. I then opened the map.bin file in notepad. It was one big row of spaces. Typically when you open a map.bin, it's gibberish. It seems as though the map.bin got completely erased, leaving everything else intact. This happened before on one of my other levels. It was a test level though, so it didn't really matter, and I dismissed it as a glitch.

tl;dr. Backup your levels.

check your recycle bin if it was deleted it will be there (unless it happened like 10 days ago) how it got deleted no one will know O.O (spooky i know ) you may have deleted it while cleaning up your data folders? i've done things like that before

edit: didn'd read the rest of your post so it doesn;t really matter but if it happens again (to a non test level) check your recycle bin lol

Never seen it happen to anyone yet, are you on Windows Vista or 7 by any chance?

Try using an undelete program (like this) to recover the file.

By the way, the Map.bin file is a Gzip archive: once unzipped it will still look like gibberish on notepad for the most part, but you can see room coordinates.

The bin file wasn't deleted so much as written over.

It was one big row of spaces.

Which probably means that there's nothing there.

Never seen it happen to anyone yet, are you on Windows Vista or 7 by any chance?

Windows 7, but the other time it happened I was running XP.

It could have been corrupted. This can happen if you have a faulty drive or get a powerloss/system crash during the saving of the file.

Maybe (not sure if this actually can happen) you created a new level with the same name, so it overwritten your level with an empty one.

Maybe (not sure if this actually can happen) you created a new level with the same name, so it overwritten your level with an empty one.

If you try, it will say something like "That level already exists" or something.

It's some kind of error, it has happened before.

Oh. I forgot to mention: I think LP is exactly correct, seeing as my computer did crash in related circumstances. The weird thing is that the backup files (map1.bkup) were also wiped.

Well that makes sense. If you were saving the level with the editor when the computer crashed it would have been in the process of updating the backups as well as the regular map.bin. I think. Don't quote me on that.

..the whole point of having 3 backup files.

Yes, but when you save, it turns the old save into backup 1, backup 1 into backup 2, and backup 2 into backup 3.
Once again, please don't quote me on that, because I am teetering dangerously over the line between remembering and making stuff up.

That's almost correct. KS actually uses backup 3 to write backup 2, 2 to write 1, 1 to write the regular. It should have only corrupted one.

unless it corrupted backup 3 then it would have wiped all the others am i correct?

Oh, I see. So it replaces each backup file one by one... Hmm... Well then...

Gah, my bad.

backup 2 -> backup 3
backup 1 -> backup 2
regular save -> backup 1
Then, it saves the game.