"Recovering" your gamertag to someone else's machine, on top of taking a looong time, can be dangerous, as I learned the hard way this past week. Long story to follow!

Last Sunday I could not connect to Live for whatever reason on my 360, so after the kids went to bed I ran through the entire single player campaign on COD4. This netted a big chunk of achievement points. I also made sure to go out of my way to pick up the non-required ones, like knifing 3 opponents in a row, not getting spotted on the sniper level, etc. Fun. Also through in some time on Mass Effect...

My friends and I meet up to play Rock Band from time to time, and when we do, we all recover our gamertags to the host's machine. We met up this past Tuesday and rocked all night long.

Cut to Wednesday night. I had a free moment so I turned my 360 on, and it was able to connect to Live right away. It recognized that my profile had been recovered to a different location, and required me to go through the steps of re-recovering my profile back to my 360. Nothing unusual. However, it turns out that because I didn't get the COD4 + Mass Effect achievements while I was connected to Live, it didn't register them on my profile when I transferred it to my friends machine. So when I transferred my profile back to my own 360, it picked up the stats that did NOT include my Sunday night playtime, and wrote over the profile on my machine, leaving me with none of the levels or achievements from either game.

Achievements are not a BIG deal to me, but they are fun, and I like competing with my friends on individual games. I will have to start Mass Effect over if I want to re-pick up the ones you get at the start of the game. I was still able to play my saved game from COD4 which was right on the last level, so I rebeat it and it unlocked all of the previous levels again, but it did not give me back my achievements. I will have to replay the entire game if I want to get my gamerscore ahead of Master Pigbeast's.

Looking back now I understand my mistake, though I still think its unusual that my own machine didn't recognize my achievements and add them in during the account migration.