I was intrigued by some off topic comments elsewhere by someone who couldn't see the need to back up TSC - or at least its critical components - before the recent update. In my day job I manage the M&E for a large multi-site organisation and these are reasons for backup that I have experienced or seen: Component failure - e.g. hard drive failure Equipment replacement due to obsolescence or age Software corruption Equipment misuse Malicious damage, both physical and malware Damage in transit Flood or spillage Fire, either self-induced or external Theft Grid overvoltage Lightning strikes Seizure of equipment by law enforcement agencies. Installation or commissioning errors and my favourite, unintended discharge of gas fire suppression equipment. The sonic shock wave wrecked multiple hard drives in a data centre! Folks, these things do happen. You are foolish if you don't backup what you value.
It's a game not a business. I still don't see the point of saving a game, especially since with fiber you can download it again in 30 minutes.. now, you have third-party content, I also think that it is useless since you can also re-download it at any time from third-party publishers. There is only free content and again the vast majority of your content can be re-uploaded... Excuse me but as far as I'm concerned I don't have any third-party content, only what's on steam, when free is only personal content not broadcast. Listen to you, even console players should save all their games and DLCs. I am answering you since this message is obviously addressed to me. It is useless to answer, this message will be erased anyway like the others by the moderation since it is inappropriate.
It really does not matter how good of an internet you have, the importance of backing up you game is to prevent you from having to reinstall from scratch. As downloads are not full proof there is a small chance it could get corrupt while downloading. Or it could corrupt your game as it installs. And with no back up you cannot restore the damage done. Your only choice would be to un-install and then re-install from scratch which would take far longer to do than restoring from a backup. As someone who works with POS devices that require downloads there is no back up option. So if unit gets corrupt because of the download, you will need to start over with another unit.
I've backed up the RailWorks core files before the update - because I was aware they could not be retrieved again other than from my own storage. I am glad to have done so, having two TSC installations now. Can play v72 (fully working, occasional editor OOMs) or v73 (obviously WiP - who knows which issues have not been spotted yet.). DTG should have made this optional themselves by distributing the update through Steam's brilliant Beta option. (Which probably needs additional depots, but DTG should have the funds as only one depot 24009 is affected.) Edit: Depot 24009 has just been updated (.exe and .dll files) - thumbnail image issues are history
All the people really clever people who have spent 20 years building PCs who don't think back up is important, are now all the ones who are privileged enough to complain about Train Simulator being broken, whereas idiots like me, who backed up have absolutely no issues whatsoe.... oh, hang on.. that's not right.
Yes, I have some stuff from Iron Horse House which I can download again. Except they have stopped making stuff for TSC quite a few years ago. A lot of third party freeware is dependant on UKTS which will disappear for good later this year. I don't think the message is addressed at you but at Everyone - like myself that did not have a Full Backup And if you only have DLC from Steam why are you complaining as you can easily download it again?
I really don't see what the reason to not back up your railworks folder is. It's not difficult. It's not expensive. It's not time consuming. If there's a good reason for not doing it, I've yet to hear it. Conversely, there's a massive list of reasons why you should. To me, not having back up (not just of TSC, but your entire machine) is like having unprotected sex with strangers. You may get away with it for years, but one day.....
.... and when the third-party or indeed steam decides to withdraw a product and no longer makes it available for download, e.g Branded NWC, Branded SWC, Virgin branded Locos, discontinued AP sound packs, AP + DTG Class 40 ......................... etc ..............etc you are happy to accept "it's only a game I'm OK" shall I continue??? If you have a back up you still own the content, if you don't then BYE BYE to all the content you have paid for but can no longer retrieve. If you wish to continue your train of thought and ways of working with TSC then good luck. I suggest you take a step back, learn from the experienced guidance you have been given, and if you choose to ignore, do not come on this forum complaining about my x, my y, my z, doesn't work because we will all point you to :- DID YOU MAKE A BACK UP!!! Good luck.
Back up... Well, from my point of view and in my case its : - pointless - time and space consumming - your back up get useless if you save, mods, change scenarios and so on, so you need to make backup quite often. IMO, most of the time with a good download solution its pointless, for games at least. Yes, sometimes a seller closes its online shop and no more access to redownload. That why some specific backup may be important to keep on an external HDD. Ofc personal files are important (i use a NAS and double for some part of if with a cloud solution) nobody want to loose personal photos or documents. But for Steam games ? It will be less hassle to redownload. But i understand that TSC is quite specific and the whole thing of STEAM verification is rather contreproductive. But for other games ? Never used backups for games since maybe 15 years. Moreover some third parties (not in TSC as far as i know) put their software exe behind a online verification. If you screw your HDD and the online store is down, tou can have all the backup you want, youll, never be able to activate it. However i have the feeling that its a less present thing now. To conclude : evry one do as he wants, in TSC specific backups may help, but saving whole folder...?
was there another update earlier this afternoon, my steam tried to update in the afternoon,TSC,but it failed,missing file privileges or something
Excellent point. I still enjoy driving the AP class 40, and using the sound packs. It's such a pity that I am stupid enough to back them up. In the event of a catastrophic failure, and AP going bust, I would be unfortunate enough to be able to just restore them and carry on usin... no, hang on, that's not right either. Yet, people who have been building PCs for 20 years keep telling me back up is not necessary, so I suppose it must be right... I mean, what do I know? Just have a new computer and all will be well... no need for back up people... I mean, if you spend 20 years plugging components into each other.... err... I mean "building" PCs, then you must have wisdom idiots like us can only dream of
I'd also make the point that if you make any changes with the TS editor then those modified files are unique to you. There's nobody else in the world who can give you a copy if you loose your master. These files will get destroyed if Steam does a file verification, which it does from time to time for unclear reasons. If you've backed them up it's easier enough to restore them. If you haven't, they've gone for ever. How do I know . . .
You know what, You're both right and Ii'm completely wqrong and out of order to suggest/recommend backing up a silly game. After all.... My Vanilla (Just Steam) install and DLC's And my insignificant modded, third party freeware and payware, self edited, community fixed, played version. There's only 274GB's of stuff (of which at least 50GB's probably more is totally unobtainable now anywhere on the internet) Don't know what I was thinking, why on earth would an idiot like me keep a constant current working backup, I'm such a clown ha ha..
Having had the pain of redoing a full reinstall and spending over a week installing everything again i ALWAYS back up my sim now your silly not to if i am honest.
I would like to back up TS (and other files of course) but with only 400GB of free space I don't have the room to do that. Train Simulator alone is well over 500GB for me. I'd like to get a large hard drive for backups and files I don't use often, but that'll have to wait.
Mass storage is inexpensive. Get a 2TB USB drive for your RailWorks backup. 60€. Or consider getting a NAS, which is your own cloud.
There's been a few good points from both sides in this thread so far. I personally am all for data backup, but am way too ignorant on how to do it properly. Last week I found some old CD-Roms with a bunch of backups, some old pictures and a slew of mods for old games like Warcraft 3 and Battlefield 1942. I also wasted some CDs to just backup whatever was on my desktop at that time for some reason... 13 year old me was not very tech savy... Neither is 34 year old me now. TL;DR: Does anyone have some cool tech tips for someone that wants to do some proper backing up but is too overwhelmed by this new fangled NAS and cloud technology? (Insert old man yells at cloud picture here)
You can get a 1TB SSD for £50 or less these days. It's worth getting one just as a back up device. Mechanical drives are even cheaper at around £30 for a 1TB drive. You can get USB3.0 external drives for the same price, or less.
If it's just Train Sim we are talking about, you simply drag your entire Railworks folder into your back up location with the right mouse button, and select "copy here". Simple as that. If you are talking about backing up your entire PC, then Windows has back up facilities built in (tons of youtube tutorials out there), or you can use a third party application such as Acronis True Image etc.
A NAS is just a network installed storage device. They are basically plug and play. You just plug them into your network switch, or router on a spare LAN port, and they appear on your Network... then just treat it as a drive... like any other. You can then set windows to use it as a back up location. Most are wifi enabled as well now, so you don't even need a ethernet cable connection. As for the exact method you use (from manually copying files, to automating it with a dedicated program) you can watch any of the thousands of tutorials on this subject on YouTube. Remember, it's not really back up unless you have a copy of your data in a different location, but as a starting point, just copies of your files on another local drive will get you out of a scrape should you accidentally delete files, or an update breaks something.
I have my entire Steam Library backed up to a USB stick (costing less than €10). All my save games sync with OneDrive. Having had to restore a few times due to issues or just moving to a new PC (or even cloning my games to a laptop), even on really fast internet it’s much quicker and easier just to copy it back, point steam to the correct place and carry on. Everyone can do what they like, but it’s so cheap and takes so little time, I always choose to back up.
The cost of something is relative to what people have available to spend. 60Euro might not be alot to you. but thats a couple days pay to some in other areas.
My TS installation is a collection of 10 years of DLC, SS patches, RWA patches, Armstrong Powerhouse patches, individual patches and enhancements, etc etc. Some stuff needed to be installed in a specific order, some stuff isn't available anymore. A lot is installed/patched manually. Do I have a backup? You betcha.
I use cloud backup; e.g OneDrive. This has the advantage of off-site backup and I can access it almost anywhere on anything. I get 1TB of storage bundled with my Office 365 subscription, so no extra cost.
1TB wouldn't cut it for me, unless we're just talking about TSC, but anyone who has a back up strategy wouldn't be doing this just for TSC if they're sensible.
I lost everything on my PC a couple of years ago, my PSU (power supply) spiked and fried all of my drives, (including my optical DVDROM drive) I did have a backup but it was a HDD within my PC setup so yes that got fried too. It also fried my EVGA 980Ti So after I replaced all the internals including a new Motherboard and CPU (I treated it as a complete upgrade at this point) I bought an external HUB, it's connected via USB but has its own dedicated power supply it also comes with its own mirroring and update scheduling software (not the greatest when I first got it but the software updates have improved it over the last couple of years) I don't believe mine is available any longer but it's basically this > CLICK LINK 8TB version (It's only for TS backups and a few mods for other games I don't care about anything else tbh) and all my photo's are on cloud storage anyway.
Then I'll put it in other words, "inexpensive" is indeed an absolute statement. So I'll put the cost in relation here. Mass storage has never been available for lower prices as of now. In the past, it could easily be worth a month's or even more of labour. I remember buying my first harddisk for my Amiga 1200 back in the nineties (fitted with a 40MB [!] Conner 2.5" drive), a 420MB Seagate HD costing me hundreds of bucks (apply inflation rate then it's even more - it was a month's wage for me back then working in the basement of a department store sorting the waste), now you are getting two terabytes of storage capacity for the price of not even a car's full up fuel tank, or a few packs of smokes. Still have a full backup of that drive as hardfiles to run in WinUAE Carefree days they were.... And I remember when the new OS in a Kickstart ROM chip was available (2.0) for the A500 - a lot of games were broken suddenly and we all went to our computer dealer and bought a smalll circuit board hosting the two ROM chips 1.3 and 2.0 with a switch to choose which one to use Off Topic Alert! That incompatibility came because of a simple fact: No skilled game developer used drivers or OS calls and libraries to ask them to plot a pixel, it was all done by directly bypassing the OS and hacking registers, absolute addressing and directly manipulating the custom chips using advanced maths to create the magic... in those days you could not afford wasting just one CPU cycle... still amazing what skilled coders get out of the C64 today when you watch the demo scene... realtime 3D with shading without a GPU on a 1MHz processor.... So it is the cheapest way to backup your files - unless you want to use Cloud systems like OneDrive - which I don't trust and don't like because all uploaded data is being scanned by Big Brother. Plug in the USB drive, copy your stuff, put the drive to a safe place.
I doubt the FBI will be breaking into your house for backing up Armstrong Powerhouse enhancement packs.
I'd rather have my stuff in my place. Just my opinion. Servers may be hacked or hijacked. There's a tech war going on. My local district's administration got hacked two months ago, they had to set up 800 PCs from scratch. I'd really advise administration to use Linux. Would save the tax payer a lot of money too.
Backup is something you don’t think you need. Untill you actually need it and it’s too late. I’ve already used my backup of the TS assets folder twice since the core updates begun. Once after each the core updates. A personal anecdote. When we recorded our 3rd album (back in 2007 i think) i never thought i’d need a backup. But i lost all the multitracks of the demos due to a harddrive crash. Particularly recreating the synthesizer sounds took a full month. That was when i learned to take backups.
You mean the steam game called "Train Simulator Classic" that all the people with no back up were screaming about not working properly after an update all last week? The one I just replaced with a back up in minutes, and just carried on as if nothing had happened? You mean that game? Train Simulator, while on Steam, is hardly a "Steam" game. The majority of what's in my Railworks folder didn't come from Steam... it didn't even come from DTG. I reckon the majority of train simmers would also be in a similar situation. Seriously... it would take me days... possibly weeks to manually put my TSC back to how it was if I didn't have a back up. If all you do is play with Steam content, then sure, I agree. [edit - actually I don't, as the last week proves... a Steam update broke everything but I just rolled back using my backups]. I have other games on Steam, and I don't back those up. TSC isn't really a game though, and it's so dependent on third party content if you are more than casual about it that back up is essential. Just look at all the people pulling their hair out over the last week when the update broke things. I just shrugged and put my back up back on while I waited for a solution. which takes one mouse click for me, and even if you do it the old fashioned way, by manually copying files to another folder, all it takes is to right drag and then select "copy here". Hardly difficult. I just think people try to justify not needing back up because they are either intimidated by it, or see it as an unnecessary expense, even when they actually realise it's importance. Spending money on storage you may not need is just not a priority to some people... except when it becomes one... they they realise they needed a back up. There's a lot of copium in this thread.
Or see it this way. I’ve spent wuite a few bucks on dlc, and quite a lot of time hunting down freeware assets and making scenarios. Would be pretty stupid if i then wouldn’t spend just a bit on protecting my investment.
Honestly i don't feel a need to backup my games. If an update Breaks something then oh well. Diddums, Time to move on. TS is not the only game that can be affected by updates breaking mods. Yes backups are important if you don't want to lose stuff, But i only backup the stuff that i care about losing. TS DLC, unless i use it all the time (i save the installers anyway) im not gonna be bothered.
Too funny. After posting my thoughts in here yesterday, I went fishing at the Rhine near the bridge that connects Karlsruhe and Wörth for some catfish, spinning. Fortunately hidden behind the trees is the world's largest truck plant (Mercedes-Benz Werk Wörth) - only a chimney is visible The riverbank was very slippery, I slid into the water, my cellphone which was in my vest pocket had a short bath. Took it out to let it dry, changed my clothes, my pal (who first panicked - but then we had a good laugh) helped me out with a pair of socks. A bottle of beer helped cooling down... Checked the phone (A22) after letting it dry for an hour - everything seemed to be ok. After returning home, I pressed it into the protective cover and boom, the lights went out. Display stays black. No way to access the data without being able to allow data transfer.... Lot of pictures gone... Luckily I made a full backup a few weeks ago, so no real damage done. Got me a Samsung XCover 5 outdoor phone just now.... Gosh I can be a silly banana - because two years ago I lost my phone during a sudden and heavy rainstorm while fishing.... phone in my soaking wet trousers' pocket didn't survive
I'm not on Rail-Sim.de. Occasionally on RWA and Steam forums, but that's enough. More playing less writing
Backing up stuff is very important and not just for TSC and games but also for photos, documents etc. Yesterday I transferred 14 video files from a camera memory card to my laptop. I then wanted to back the files up from the laptop to an external drive but ran into an issue. Unfortunately I have now got 5 out of the 14 video files with issues on the laptop and cannot transfer them to back them up. There's also the issue that when I initially transferred the 14 video files from the memory card, the laptop decided to delete the original files from the memory card. Because of this I have lost 45 minutes of footage and no way of retrieving the files. I always back things up and often have backup backups, especially for important things that may be impossible to replace or get hold of again due to the GDPR rules etc.
There are just people who will never see the importance, and you will never get them to see it. "I've never had backups and I've never lost anything in 20 years"... you know the type. Probably the same people who say things like "I'm an excellent driver - I've never had a crash in 30 years of driving" etc. You can lead a horse to water..... It's not just people of a "certain age" either. I had this issue with my students. One of the first lectures they ever received was about managing their data and backing up, and part of the lecture was to explain that losing data will not, and will never be grounds for a deadline extension, and will never be regarded as extenuating circumstances. Guess what regularly happened? Yeah.... LOL Student: "I need an extension of the deadline". Me: "Why's that? What happened?" Student: "I dropped my laptop and now I think the hard drive is broken" Me: "Don't worry, just use your back up" Regularly go out and get hammered (expensive).... can't spend a few quid on a bunch of flash drives (cheap). (shrug).
