Important 1.4 PSA: Back up your data now.

Status
Not open for further replies.

Tunnel King

Administrator
Staff member
Administrator
1.4 is a major update of the game. Part of this update involves a significant change to world and player file save formats that will not be backward compatible with earlier versions of the game.

Once you load an existing world or character into 1.4, you will not be able to use those worlds/players in "older" versions any longer UNLESS you made backup copies.
  • Existing world/player files should load seamlessly into 1.4. While every effort has been made and extensive testing performed, we cannot guarantee that absolutely every existing world/character will load without issues. Having a copy of the original format file to compare to a "problematic" outcome from loading will be crucial to the developers for debugging.
  • If you load your favorite world/character file into 1.4, and then decide you're not quite ready to absorb all the changes 1.4 brings just yet, you will not be able to "go back" to 1.3.5.3 UNLESS you made a backup first.
  • If you want to try out the new tModLoader version with your older worlds/characters, you will need to use the pre-1.4 versions to do so for the time being (until tML upgrades to support 1.4)

What do we mean by "backups"?

Yes, the game has a 'backup' mechanism when you load and play the game, but this is for emergency purposes only. Yes, the game has a cloud save mechanism, where you can move/sync game files to another site.

What we are advising here is to make a copy of your game data that the game itself cannot touch. This can be as simple as using the basic copy/move file features of your OS (Windows/Mac/Linux) to duplicate your data in a separate safe place. This should only take you a few moments to do.

What data should we back up?

You should consider making copies of the following:
  • Your Worlds folder
  • Your Players folder (including the individual map files folders contained within that)
  • The data and configuration files
    • achievements.dat
    • config.json
    • favorites.json
    • input profiles.json
    • servers.dat
These folders/files are located by default in
  • Windows: "%USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\Terraria"
  • Mac: ~/Library/Application support/Terraria
  • Linux: ~/.local/share/Terraria
You should consider making similar backups as a regular task

We all know that "stuff" happens. Your power goes out or your laptop battery runs down. The game crashes for some unforeseen reason. Your disk drive bites the dust. That "friend" that you thought you could trust griefed your world when you weren't paying attention.

Any of these situations can be minimized by having a reliable, recent backup to fall back on. It's simple to do, yet most of us don't do it often enough.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom