Restoring Lost Macro Palette

Last night right in the middle of Dyna lost my Ctrl/Alt macro palette (not the entire book) for a set of nukes while playing RDM.

I doubt likely, but was just wondering if there was any way I could restore just that from the ffxi config util backup they let you make since I have one of those from not too long ago?

Barring that is there any better way to protect my macros so if a palette gets wiped I have better options than overwriting everything with a backup or rewriting the palette?

This is perhaps the 3rd or 4th time I've lost macros just randomly in all my time playing the game.
Rare, but really annoying when it happens.

This seems to happen to me when I zone and my hard drive is too full, it will reset the current macro set on both the Ctrl and alt sides. It can also happen if the game loses write access to your macro files while zoning.

Edit: unfortunately there isn’t really an easy recovery once they are lost

Save them to the server, load from the server. It does take a logout/login, but so long as you're not in the middle of an event, it will only take a minute, max.

Got my macros back.
Big thank you to Katurra of Bismarck for showing me how.
They're waiting on account approval and will post the solution here before long so people will know how to do it in the future.

I know of a few methods, but I'd love to hear yours. However, each one of these options does work:

1.) Backup the Playonline/FFXI/USER folder
2.) Close all instances of POL/FFXI, run FFXIConfig.exe and click Save Settings.
3.) From the character select screen, choose Save to Save your settings to server and make sure the displayed timestamp is correct/updated. (I don't really know what Save to HDD Slot A-D does).

If you have any other options, I'd love to hear it.

Forgot about this until seeing a thread on macros bump up just now.
Anyways seems like the method never got posted so here it is roughly, might take some googling for your specific OS since I use Windows 7, 10 and 11 support this though. Also it's a bit of a pain to do.

Basically in Windows you already have "System Protection" turned on for the drive that has FFXI installed on it so it's taking what I think are snapshots of the drive on some routine schedule for restore points. Having it on will save old versions of the macro files.

As a precaution before trying this you can use FFXIConfig's "In Game Settings" Save feature in case you're afraid of screwing up anything further.

If you ever have a situation where your macro palette got wiped you can try this:

1. Edit a macro in that palette with a searchable word like "MissingMacroHere" or anything that can be searched easily.

2. Log out or might even have to quit out the game entirely. I've tried zoning and that didn't always work so if you want to try that instead your mileage my vary.

3. Use a program like Notepad++ with its "Find in Files" function to search your ..\PlayOnline\SquareEnix\FINAL FANTASY XI\USER folder wherever you have the game installed for the keyword (i.e. "MissingMacroHere") you saved in the wiped macro palette prior.

4. Once you have the filename and its location in the search result you can navigate to it in explorer, check its properties, go to the previous versions tab and copy the old version out to someplace like desktop then back in over the current one (at least on win7 for me, my restore button is busted idk why) or just hit restore on an older version if that works for you.

Note: You can try opening the file before copy over to confirm it more or less has the macros in it you remember, it will be a little mangled looking in a text editor because of how the file is formatted, but the old hand written macro lines should be evident.

5. Log back in to see the macros restored.

Sorry if details aren't as clear as they should be, but hopefully this points people in the right direction and saves some grief.

This is a great idea and is very resourceful, thank you for sharing this with us!

I know that if a background process is makeing a lot of read/write actions, on the HDD that the game is installed on, that it can cause temporary game freezes, in particular in instanced zones.

I'm starting to suspect that if this happens while zoning or logging out that it can be the cause of those random macro losses.

What do you guys think?

This is definitely possible. I don't know what I have personally to keep seeing this one character have his macros turn blank every zone attempt though. When I do a full-shutdown and restore from POL server, the issue goes away for a long time. (Maybe it has to do with a /shutdown in a busy zone with lots of yells vs /shutdown or /logout in mog house? (I know that on Vanilla POL/FFXI, at one point in time, the Macros and Markers in your USER folder would only get saved to disk until the client is /shutdown).

Correct, FFXI is written for PS2 where there's nothing else accessing the disk at any given time, so in many, many scenarios when the game client can't load a file, it doesn't think "oh it's busy let me retry", it thinks "oh it's corrupted let's nuke it and start from scratch".

FWIW, maybe I've just been lucky but I've never experienced this issue of macros being wiped from my palettes, but tons of friends have experienced it, often multiple times a month.

I'm not convinced it's a home grown FFXI issue, I think it has something to do with an addon, plugin, etc.

It's wild how unbelievably lazy Square Enix are, they have barely done anything at all to the core game since they launched the PC version (which was already a pretty slapdash port, with many things not working properly).

They are utterly hopeless with live service games.

They never try improve anything, they just leave it going till the wheels fall off. The UI is still built for CRT monitors, the lighting effects are using ps2 ported systems, that are so old it causes issues on many modern cards, they still don't use a proper mipmap system with pre-built textures, there is wild z-fighting cause direct x is so old, it doesn't update things till you zone, it's still locked to 56k connection speeds.

This is not some f2p game like Guild wars 1 either, it's a subscription service with constantly expanding monetization systems.

I cannot even imagine running a business the way they do.

Windower and Ashita are improved for free, more than the game they are used for that makes them millions and has a monthly sub.

RadialArcana pls. It's too early in the week/month/year for this ***.

SE posted an update for once, that aligns with their previous annoucement, just a month prior: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/63817-February-Version-Update ...and it's the most positive display of incremental progress in YEARS. Let's just all be happy and pray to Altana that the FFXI momentum continues.

It's definitely an issue that can happen vanilla, but vanilla it generally just happens if you're doing something very HDD intensive in the background - like video recording, but not only.
Addons definitely make it happen more often, specifically mote gearswap libraries had a thing where they would let you switch macro book/set when changing jobs... with a delay that was too short, and could cause file load errors in some situations, causing macro/equipset wipe. We since patched it in windower, but plenty of people still have similar lines in their homemade GS profiles, so the issue still happens a lot.

And there's other ways to cause it too, ofc! But the issue is always failure to load from disk due to busy disk or due to file lock (= multiple entities trying to open the same file at the same time).

Lots of really interesting information here, thanks for sharing, but I think placing the blame at the feet of SE and their PS2 design is a bit off-target, when it's something that happens exceedingly rarely in normal play (read: nearly never).

If you're running a regular instance of FFXI, there aren't a whole lot of scenarios where multiple programs are trying to read/write the same ffxi-related file. So...IDK, certainly seems weird to me to say:


I'm sure it's factually accurate, but I think the "many, many scenarios" are mostly caused by people *** with the way FFXI operates in unintended ways, so I take umbrage with the particular way this (and other issues) is talked about (not just by you).