Thoughts on moving characters and worlds to the cloud?

[ScottP480]

Hi all,

I'm finally building a new computer for the first time since 2011 and I'm dealing with the process of backing up as much stuff as possible. I bought Terraria shortly after it released and I still have worlds and characters from back then that I don't want to lose. I plan on backing everything up either way, but I'm also curious about the state of moving everything to the cloud. Does anyone have any thoughts on how that functionality is these days? For both characters and worlds.

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I feel like when it first became a feature, people suggested not using it. But I don't remember why. That was a while ago though so I'm curious if the general consensus changed on that, if it became better, etc. If there are any issues with it, please let me know (such as potential problems with mods in the future, permanently corrupting files, etc.)

Thanks!

 

[Sora_92]

As far as I know, cloud is notorious at deleting/corrupting worlds and characters. Especially so in modded, but I do think it happens with vanilla too. It's probably a risky idea to use that to back up things you don't want to lose.

 

[r4v1n6]

@Sora_92 is right.

I don't know if 1.4 improves this, but before, using the Steam cloud save feature was rather risky. A lot of people lost their data this way. Just take a look in the PC Support section on this forum. If you do want to use the feature, make frequent backups of the files yourself (they aren't in the usual place in /Documents but instead somewhere in the /Steam hiearchy) and keep several revisions around.

Before 1.4 it wasn't even safe to use the regular save feature. A fair number of people has lost their data that way. In almost all cases, the backup (.bak) has been useless. It doesn't seem like Terraria handled the backup properly when saving. That may have changed. After a recent 1.4 update the game now keeps an additional backup file around (configurable). Hopefully the backups are now handled in a safe manner. I don't know for certain though as I don't have access to the source code.

TML handles regular saves better. In addition to the normal saves, it keeps up to five revisions in a separate location stored in .zip archives.

So in addition to using Google Drive/OneDrive/DropBox, you should probably use thumb drives to backup your important data.