For real?

So I shouldn't uninstall Galaxy now? Or I will move everything elsewhere, get rid of Galaxy and move it back.
That's incredibly silly. I would understand it if the Galaxy files and subfolders were directly in the folder with games but this way it is incomprehensible.

It is a very bad bug, but it doesn't seem to be common, or otherwise the forum would be full of pissed people.

I had Galaxy installed on one PC on D:/WinPrg/GalaxyClient/ (I think, anyway not the default place. I quite often install Windows apps under /WinPrg/, just an old habit, and also so that Windows will not restrict how I modify those folders). I uninstalled it from there, maybe even a couple of times, and it definitely didn't wipe out all the other applications/folders installed in that same directory. They are still there.

Not sure if that bug the OP saw was only with certain Galaxy version, or if it happens only if you re-install Galaxy on top of existing Galaxy installation (without uninstalling it manually), or what triggered it in his case.

Naturally, doing what you suggested might be a good precaution, until more is known what exactly triggers the bug.

Holy crap what an awful bug to have! My condolences, OP :(

The culprit has to be the installer, right? As long as GOG fixed the bug with a new installer, it'll be alright even if I have the same error, right?

I have the same folder structure, now I'm scared :(

I'm not sure, but i think that, MAYBE, THIS specific bug report thread would have deserved a blue line somewhere.

Especially since all the older releases save stuff in the installation directory. I think I'd go on a rampage if Galaxy deleted all my GOG games including the saved games.

Wow, that is absolutely epic fail. I can see a design oversight with the issue previously reported about Galaxy blowing away everything in the GalaxyClient\ folder hierarchically but to blow away parallel level subdirs is incredibly dangerous and could cause serious data loss depending on how someone lays out their hard disk.

Out of all of the Galaxy bugs I've seen posted to date I would have to consider this the absolute #1 urgent top priority but yet. Destruction of data, in particular 3rd party data is an epic bug to say the least. I hope GOG prioritizes looking into this and fixing it ASAP and posts instructions on how people can avoid experiencing the issue if possible.

I've got Galaxy installed to its default location of C:\Program Files\GalaxyClient and my games are installed to E:\GOG Games. If I read you correctly, this could in theory blow away all subdirectories of C:\Program Files

That would devastate my computer (or anyone's really) and definitely would cause me to be apeshit upset about it for sure!

Top priority bug to be looked at IMHO!

I hear ya. If I lost my saves for my witcher 1 playthrough right now I'd be pissed. they don't save to the installation directory of course BUT U KNO WAT I MEAN

I HEAR YA.

If the Galaxy uninstaller would routinely do that, I think the whole forum would be apeshit. I'd find it surprising if lots of people wouldn't have tried to uninstall the client at some point (e.g. because they had some problem and wanted to re-install it, or whatever). I think I've uninstalled it a couple of times, and other subfolders were not affected.

Whether this is a new bug which has just appeared on the very latest versions... I guess it is easy to check. I'll be brave and try to uninstall Galaxy from this computer where I'm writing this. If you hear nothing from me for a few days, it might be my PC blew up.

I uninstalled the latest Galaxy client (Galaxy 1.0.3.985), and I had no problem. Other subfolders are still intact. Galaxy was installed under c:\WinPrg\GalaxyClient\. Lots of other applications (including Steam) are also installed under c:\WinPrg\, but my GOG Games are under c:\GOG Games\, in case that would matter. They are also intact, but then they were installed manually, the old way. Again, not sure if that would make any difference for the bug.

In fact, the Galaxy uninstall didn't remove even the whole Galaxy installation either, I still have the C:\WinPrg\GalaxyClient\ folder there, containing 1.25MB of files (there's one .js file under GalaxyClient\web\js\).

Not sure then what would trigger the bug wiping all folders on the same level as GalaxyClient\, or has it now been fixed in the very latest version?

It's covered in the first post, but lots of people who use Galaxy do so because it is advertised on the front page and don't even necessarily know the forums even exist. For those that do come to the forums, they don't always read the first post fully. Eventually the problem will be resolved in a Galaxy update, but the sooner the better because there are people now reporting Galaxy updating and removing half their hard drive including things outside of it's own playground (in another thread). Ultimately though, more people will end up bit by this problem until it's fixed so we can expect to see more and more reports of it until then.

The only thing I've had Galaxy blow away was individual games that were already installed when trying to import and it ended up redownloading the entire game instead. I think that had something to do with directory names being different or something. Wasn't a big issue for me so far as I don't have anything irreplaceable in any one game's install directory per se. I think Galaxy hosed my Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 installs which had the custom mods installed that combine the two into one big mega game though. That's well documented to re-install easily enough though at some point.

Edited: Doh, for some reason I thought my above response was in GALAXY BETA thread, and I was referring to this thread in my comment. :)

Yes, one always needs to keep in mind that bugs in software are sometimes black and white issues of the nature "everyone will absolutely encounter this bug" or "nobody encounters that at all, it's a bug in your system", but more often than not bugs in software depend on unique factors such as where a program got installed, what hardware the system has (such as video specific problems), whether the person is using the default configuration or they have changed options that are configurable - and what options they changed. Other factors may include running out of disk space (knowingly or completely unknowingly) on one or more devices, malware/viruses/etc. Another type of bug is a transient bug - one that does not happen every single time but seems to be random and might require a specific set of circumstances to all line up at the same time for the problem to occur. Some bugs are easily reproduceable 100% of the time, while others are not reproduceable at all or might only happen 1 out of 10 tries randomly. Software often contains race conditions in which things are supposed to happen in the order A, B, C possibly with specific timing, but maybe once in a blue moon the timing of something is off and it results in B, A, C being the order that happens which causes the software to malfunction.

I would definitely have to agree that if this problem happened to every person every time they installed it, that it would be a massive problem and the forums would be up in fireworks from just about every single person though. We're not seeing that of course, but we are seeing numerous people reporting issues where either the installation of, upgrading of, or general usage of Galaxy client has somehow caused a directory or several directories on their hard disk to just get blown away for no apparently obvious reason. I have no doubt in my mind that this is a real problem people are reporting and that they haven't accidentally right clicked "Delete" on their own. If it was one person maybe, but there are many people reporting the issue and GOG has actually acknowledged the problem with the GalaxyClient directory being blown away confirming that if people install games into subdirs of that or put other things in there they will lose them at the moment. GOG has not yet confirmed the problem being described above, but if it's happened to one person it may very well happen to others too, and it might take something happening to 5/10/100 people until one person steps forward on a forum like this to mention it too. :)

In the end though, these types of issues are usually not of the "works for me so it works for everyone" or "works for nobody, everyone is effected equally" type of categorization but rather software bugs tend to be more about trying to see what is unique about a given person's system, installation, configuration and usage of an application to figure out whether it is a software bug and if so what the triggers are to cause reproducability and ultimately find a proper fix.

I've installed/uninstalled/upgraded Galaxy several times and have not encountered this specific bug. I have however encountered several odd bugs that nobody else has mentioned in the forums, some of which have subsequently been fixed too. I also experienced an issue that BKGaming reported that nobody else seemed to be having but I was able to reproduce here and unable to make it go away (game icons spinning as if loading but never actually loading, as well as client graphical errors/corruption). Completely uninstalling Galaxy client, then manually purging the leftover directories it left behind with files that did not actually get removed, then reinstalling it made the problems go away. It seems that the install/uninstall/upgrade of the client is not smooth in that it can possibly leave a mixed version laying around that contains some older files and some newer ones that interact with random behaviour the result.

Hopefully more people who experience these issues will come forward and share their details to help try and narrow down the cause of the issue though, or we ourselves might end up being the next to experience it. :)

Holy shit I have the same exact locations as TC described for his case.

Gotta uninstall Galaxy now.

Are you talking about several different issues here together, like that Galaxy uninstallation may remove all files and folders (including GOG games) installed inside the GalaxyClient\ subfolder? I think these are different issues (at least in severity) that should be discussed separately.

Even the Steam client uninstallation seems to work like this. I just uninstalled Steam, and it removed absolutely everything under the C:\WinPrg\Steam\, including all the installed Steam games under the steamapps subfolder, as well as a directory (temppi\) and a file (temppi\temppifile.txt) I created manually under the Steam directory just before Steam uninstallation. The whole Steam directory, and everything inside it, was wiped out, no questions asked. In fact, it did more than Galaxy uninstallation, as Galaxy didn't wipe the whole directory, but left some .js folder and file there (possibly created after the Galaxy installation?). Steam wiped out even the directory and txt file I created there manually.

Maybe that is bad design, but by some logic, maybe also expected. While I might have preferred the uninstall script to leave e.g. my temppi\temppifile.txt intact (because I had added it there manually afterwards), I am not really surprised it decided to wipe out everything that was there.


However, what the OP described is far worse and unexpected, similar to if Steam uninstallation would have wiped out the whole C:\WinPrg\ contents, also files not related to Steam in any way. That's why I was interested only in this particular problem, how many have reported it and possibly what triggers it.

I mentioned how the Galaxy uninstallation works for me because some seemed to fear that this is a widespread problem where no one can uninstall Galaxy anymore (without losing lots of other data as well from the common parent directory). Of course that doesn't help those who would be hit by it.

Stop! Shouldn't that mean that you shouldn't dare to uninstall Galaxy, as it could wipe out lots of other apps and games too? :)

I cut-pasted all other folders inside \games folder to somewhere else and then proceeded to uninstall Galaxy, so I am ok. xD

I had over 600 GBs worth of Steam games in that folder, if I were lose them all because of stupid bug I'd probably have written angry letter to GOG lol.