PC Back it up, now!

Bethany

Bethany

Empress of Light
No, I'm not Coolio. Not by a long shot. But with all the reports of items vanishing, losing modifiers, or changing into other items, I'm backing up my game files before every PC play session. This way if anything awful happens I can revert to how things were as of the most recent backup.

If you're not doing this, it might be smart to begin. The directories are (replace BethanyFerrell in the following with your Windows login name):

C:\Users\BethanyFerrell\Documents\My Games\Terraria\Worlds
C:\Users\BethanyFerrell\Documents\My Games\Terraria\Players​

I use 7Zip to compress those two folders and their contents into a .zip file, which I then rename so the date is in the filename. I then copy the .zip file into a Backups folder. You could also use a USB thumb drive, external HD, DVD+/-R or CD-R, cloud storage, or a stack of 5.25" single-sided single-density floppies three miles tall.

On my system a .zip file containing eight worlds and two fairly active characters occupies about 70 Megabytes.

Hope this helps someone to avoid disappointment, discouragement, or disaster.
 
Not to be that guy, but you really should block your name out of those paths. While it's admittedly highly unlikely, if someone wanted to get access to your system, you're giving them half the information they need.

That said, what you're giving is straight up good advice period, whether bugs are floating around or not. Never know when your hard drive's gonna crash. Back-ups, peeps. If you've got 'any'-thing valuable on your machine, make them a thing you do.
 
No worries, my name's no secret. But thank you for thinking of that. :dryadsmile:

P.S.: Besides, my real name is Lotharia Montefiori Van Den Heuvel.
 
Well, my Pretty Much Everything instructor is a freelance HIPAA-compliance infosec consultant, so I've kinda had basic infosec stuff hammered into my head so much over the last few semesters that I'm surprised I'm not bleeding (or dead), so... Yeah. >_>

EDIT: And now I know you're Dutch nobility! Le gasp!
 
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HIPAA is a stern taskmistress, that's true. I keep no patient data on machines in this system. No no no. That's all in a secure data center with armed guards and everything.
 
I'd make one minor suggestion to streamline the process. Instead of backing up two folders separately, go up a couple levels and copy the

C:\Users\<yourusername>\Documents\My Games\Terraria

...folder. Along with preserving all your worlds and characters, it also saves some additional stuff like config.json (your game settings), achievements.dat (your local achievement progress), and servers.dat (recent server history if you play multiplayer). There might also be additional folders for mods and programs that store extra data there as well.

Of course, it's probably a good idea to always make backups of pretty much any data you value, not just game files. I wouldn't advise using the 5.25" floppies for the job (and believe it or not, I still have a few boxes of those lying around).
 
Sounds good to me.

I'm afraid my last few boxes of 5.25" disks went into the rubbish long ago. I ought to have kept them, but it didn't occur to me that retrocomputing would become A Thing some day. I might still have an 8" boot disc from an IBM 370 somewhere, though I doubt it would still be readable. Sadly I wasn't able to accept the offer of the system it came from, which got scrapped.
 
Sounds like a good idea, but with the Steam Cloud being a thing now I see not point in it as I've lost worlds that weren't backed on the cloud when my PC crashed, but worlds that were were still there as they were the only ones I cared of keeping in case something happened.

But there are paranoid people that would rather be safe than sorry.
 
Quite a few players have reported world or player file corruption issues while using Steam Cloud. I've not experienced that but I do think the risk is real, and I consider it rationally cautious rather than paranoid to avoid losing players or whole worlds to corruption.

In any case, it's easy, takes very little time, and gives close to 100% certainty that your game progress can't be wiped out by accident — not all of the progress, anyway.

Which reminds me that I haven't backed up my files in a while. Time to get out the USB key and refresh its copies.:dryadsmile:
 
I was one of the people who had their world reverted when using steam cloud. I now back-up after every session. Definitely, it does happen, don't waste your time thinking that "it'll happen to somebody else" because you are somebody else to somebody else.
 
NetherArum said:
I was one of the people who had their world reverted when using steam cloud. I now back-up after every session. Definitely, it does happen, don't waste your time thinking that "it'll happen to somebody else" because you are somebody else to somebody else.
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Never had issues with backing up my worlds, but just because you said somebody else to somebody else is me doesn't mean it will be me. I've played Terraria for over 4 years, no problems with anything, ever.

So saying that it can happen to anyone is a broad statement when anyone is me and I have not had anything happen. Yea sure, I've deleted my worlds on accident in game, but that was because I deleted them, not them being corrupt or not being saved during the Save & Exit.

I would just put this as a guide, saying if you are paranoid about losing your worlds do this, not saying this needs to be done.

And being so worried about a game that won't work right means there is a problem on your end if it's not a problem on someone else's.
 
Myth said:
Never had issues with backing up my worlds, but just because you said somebody else to somebody else is me doesn't mean it will be me. I've played Terraria for over 4 years, no problems with anything, ever.

So saying that it can happen to anyone is a broad statement when anyone is me and I have not had anything happen. Yea sure, I've deleted my worlds on accident in game, but that was because I deleted them, not them being corrupt or not being saved during the Save & Exit.

I would just put this as a guide, saying if you are paranoid about losing your worlds do this, not saying this needs to be done.

And being so worried about a game that won't work right means there is a problem on your end if it's not a problem on someone else's.
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It will be you someday, I can guarantee that. It may not be a Terraria world or related to Terraria, but a software service that you have progress on will ultimately get corrupted or otherwise lost. It does happen, and it will happen to you. You are literally stuck in the mindset that I just described, which is "it'll happen to somebody else". You ARE somebody else. It'll happen to everyone at some point in their lives, including you. You are not exempt, at all.

4 years of no occurrences doesn't mean it won't ever occur. You can be absolutely responsible with your device, not downloading anything that will corrupt it or get a virus or anything, etc. However, drives fail. Sometimes you put too much strain on the CPU unintentionally, and it'll crash. There are things that are beyond our control, and backing up is a very easy and safe way for your stuff to be protected in the event that something happens.

Backing up your stuff is a must in general, ESPECIALLY if you have things you regard as important. It literally takes less than a minute to make sure your data is safe.

I'm not worried or underestimating the game's ability to save its data, or anything else' ability to save their data or otherwise perform as expected. Things, however, can always happen. Murphy's Law describes this really well; "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
 
NetherArum said:
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So you are assuming I don't know know that things can go wrong? I'm sorry, I thought I was talking about Terraria here for a second... let me fix that...

Well I'm safe to assume you don't realize you are on forums.terraria.org, not google.com, where everything can be found...

I'm going to leave this conversation as I can see it going badly because I was discussing the on-topic, saving Terraria worlds and characters, and not the, off-topic, losing progress on a program that's not Terraria.

And saying backing up data is a must, of course it is, but in a game like Terraria I see no reason to go the extra mile (for me) on making sure my worlds and characters are 'safe' when I'm not worried about losing progress because this game is fun to me so starting over isn't a bad thing. Sure I've lost work on countless hours of fun, but the future brings more, whether it be starting over or continuing where I left off.
 
Myth said:
So you are assuming I don't know know that things can go wrong? I'm sorry, I thought I was talking about Terraria here for a second... let me fix that...

Well I'm safe to assume you don't realize you are on forums.terraria.org, not google.com, where everything can be found...

I'm going to leave this conversation as I can see it going badly because I was discussing the on-topic, saving Terraria worlds and characters, and not the, off-topic, losing progress on a program that's not Terraria.

And saying backing up data is a must, of course it is, but in a game like Terraria I see no reason to go the extra mile (for me) on making sure my worlds and characters are 'safe' when I'm not worried about losing progress because this game is fun to me so starting over isn't a bad thing. Sure I've lost work on countless hours of fun, but the future brings more, whether it be starting over or continuing where I left off.
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It wasn't my intention to be patronizing. I'm sorry if I was. Additionally, your attitude of Terraria is more relaxed than mine is; for me, I've only recently started a new character on an expert playthrough, so Terraria is kind of important to me. I just wanted to stress the importance of backing things up and didn't realize that you already knew.
 
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