Hello,

After waiting and receiving no support from Bethesda about a vault that could not be loaded without a crash, I decided to take a more drastic approach. I restored my iPhone to an earlier back up. I found this did let me load the vault with the cost that all my phone changes (texts, configuration changes, saves for other games, etc.) for the past week were lost (because I needed to restore a backup from a week ago).

In hindsight, this solution would have been better if I did the restore immediately when the vault crashing issue began. This way, much less data from other programs would have been lost.

iTunes only kept one backup for my iPhone that unfortunately already had the bad vault version in it. Fortunately, Windows still had a version of the iPhone backup folder from a week ago which was about right timing-wise for just before the vault went bad.

I backed up my iPhone and then made a copy of the iPhone backup folder to someplace safe before using Windows to restore to the prior version.

I found that deleting the current iPhone backup folder before restoring the prior version seems to produce a cleaner restore. Restoring without deleting the current iPhone backup folder seems to merge the old and new files.

Well, my vault got into a bad state for the second time and I had to restore from backup. This time I got caught on the sending a 50+ dweller into the wasteland bug.

It's sad that this is necessary, but I've taken some steps to make doing backups and restores easier.

First, in iTunes I turned on the "Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically" item. This is because I don't want my iPhone to make backups automatically and possibly overwrite a good vault backup with a bad vault backup. I now only do manual backups and I do it fairly often.

Second, I am not using the cloud for backups so that I can more easily make backups of the iTunes backups on my local computer. This is just in case I need to go back to an earlier backup.