Well, this happened to me before, and I reinstalled thinking it was a bad install and would fix it, but its happened again. When I load up my neighborhood sims are missing from families, sometimes whole families, with their house still there. I haven't moved any folders. In the memories of friends and family who are still left behind it only says "$subject" in the place of the sim. It seems like their file is totally gone. If I use my backup (which sadly is somewhat outdated) they appear again.

Has anyone ran into this problem? I read the thing about the file limit and removed a lot of my downloads about a week ago, is there a hack that can cause this issue?

Thanks

Well, one thing that can cause it is deleting sims from the simbin, or moving sims between neighborhoods causing a total implosion of the hoods. Not sure if that is the problem in your case.

The only thing I can think of, is I did create a downtown neighborhood (the default). The 'home' neighborhood is a custom map, but I didn't care about townies so I let the game generate them. I didn't move any sims between neighborhoods or delete with the simbin though. I was playing the downtown for a while, then when I went back to the home neighborhood, 7 whole familes were gone, and several single sims were missing, mostly babies and children. :/

I ran into this issue a while ago and may have just run into it again! For me it seemed to happen after my game had crashed a couple of times. After it crashed I guess it started corrupting my neighborhoods and when I looked in my characters folder it had less characters and some files that said TempDBSegmentPackedFile. Unfortunately I posted on three different websites and nobody had any real answers for me. I reinstalled and put my saved neighborhoods back in. One thing I've been trying to do is be much more careful about downloading lots which could have corrupted or incompatible files in them so my game wouldn't crash.

I did have a few crashes before, but I don't have any 'TempDBSegmentPackedFile' files. I did suspect maybe the files maybe were corrupt, I am a download junkie
Overall, there isn't very much support for the Mac version of The Sims. I'll probably have to play the pc version when I get a new PC.

This happened to me, too. What probably happened is your game ran up against the file limit. My theory is that when the game loads a neighborhood and detects the limit has been reached or exceeded, it eats character files until the number is back under the limit before loading. Those sims are, unfortunately, gone forever. I lost almost a whole hood this way. When you created the downtown, you created a file for each lot, as well as a whole bunch of downtownies. That could have put you over.

To prevent this from happening, try loading the game without the hoods that you don't plan to use. For example, if you know you're only going to be playing in Pleasantview, take out the folders for Strangetown and Varonaville and put them somewhere else until you need them. This cuts down on the amount of files your game has to load.