How to: protect your save games on the internet

[StaticV]

I was reading a few AARs and I noticed a discussion in one about how failed hard drives are a common problem for losing AAR save games. So I thought I would back mine up on the internet, then I thought I might as well explain to everyone here how they can do it too.

First you'll need a source to save your save games to, either a second hard drive, a usb thumb drive, another computer on the network, or what I will be using in this guide, an internet file synchronization service. There are many services providers for this, I chose DropBox (http://www.dropbox.com/ has an explanation video, more info here) only because I had heard of it first. Theres a massive comparison list of these services on wikipedia here.

What dropbox does is put a folder in your home folder (My Documents in XP); and then anything you put in this folder it saves on the internet for you. Then say if you're on another computer, you can either install drop box, or go to the drop box website, and access your files. Here's a screenshot of my dropbox folder after I set it up to save my save games for sengoku and hearts of iron.



So the easy way you can now protect your save game is to just copy and paste them to that folder, but that's not very practical so I'm going to show you a way to have your computer do this automatically. We're going to do this with something called a junction point (more info here). Basically what it is, is a way to put one folder in two places at the same time.

First what you'll need to do is open a command prompt with administrator access. To this go to your start menu, all programs, then either search for command prompt, or go to accessories, command prompt. Right click on it and select run ad administrator, it should look like this: * note it will not appear if you do not have administrative access


A black window will appear with white text, the first thing you will have to do is enter the following command to take you to your sengoku directory, I will list 3 possible default locations, if you installed it somewhere else, use that directory path instead.

Default install path:

cd C:\Games\Sengoku

Steam Path:

cd C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\sengoku

64Bit Windows Steam Path:

cd C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\sengoku

To see if it worked, type dir and hit enter, you should see a list of files in your sengoku directory, the one were looking for is save games, it should have a line like this:

10/11/2011  12:13 PM    <DIR>          save games

Next will create the link, you will need the path to your drop box folder, you can see from my first screenshot the path for me was "C:\Users\Mike\Dropbox", substitute your own.

Windows 7/Vista:

mklink /D /J "C:\Users\Mike\Dropbox\sengoku save games" "save games"

Windows XP:

fsutil hardlink create "C:\Users\Mike\Dropbox\sengoku save games" "save games"

If it worked you should get output like this:

Junction created for C:\Users\Mike\Dropbox\sengoku save games <<===>> save games

You can also navigate to your dropbox folder and now see there is a new folder there called sengoku saved games, and if you open it all your saved games will be in there.

Next I will tell you how to verify everything is being saved to dropbox properly.

 

[StaticV]

If everything went well you should have a folder named "sengoku saved games" in your drop box folder. Now to make sure this folder is being saved on the drop box servers, you first need to make sure the dropbox client is running. If it is, the blue cardboard box icon should appear in your task bar on the bottom right corner of your desktop, heres a picture. *note for me it was between the clock and the skype green circle with check mark, you may have to hit the up arrow on the left side before you can see it in the pop up


If it is running, then your save games should be syncing now, if they haven't already synced. To tell look at the small icon on the folder, here are two examples:



The first is my hearts of iron save games, notice its icon is a small blue circle with two circular arrows pointing at each other. This means syncing is still in progress, and your files are still being uploaded (which means they are NOT safe yet). Just wait, it may take awhile to save them depending on your internet's upload speed. Once this process is completed you will get the green circle with check mark icon on the folder, shown in the picture of my sengoku folder.

To have a second level of verification you can go to the dropbox website, login and browse to your sengoku save games folder. Here you should see a list of all the save games stored on the drop box website (and thus safe if your hard drive crashes!). Here's an example from mine:



Now once your save games are on dropbox and you want to use them on a different hard drive, you have two options. Either you just have to download them from that website, then copy and paste them to the save games directory in your sengoku folder. Or of course you can also do the same process from the first post on the new computer, then install dropbox and it will sync the save games from dropbox to your sengoku directory for you.

*WARNING* Deleting the files on the dropbox website, or the from your dropbox folder will also delete them from sengoku entirely once it syncs! Don't delete any save games you want to keep at any time!

Any comments, particularly on how I can improve this, are much appreciated. I will also try and answer questions to the best of my ability.

 

[unmerged(382404)]

Good reference. Thanks for taking time to put this up.

 

[Hamann]

wow, awesome stuff! I was reluctant to use dropbox because I found that manually copying stuff to it was tiresome, but this solves my problem. Once I have the time to set it all up I'll edit this post telling if I had any troubles with the tutorial.

Edit: Worked wonderfully for me, thanks a lot! This should be posted on the wiki once it is up and running

 

[SlyEcho]

If you have Vista or 7 it's better to use symbolic links instead of a junction. This way they don't have to be on the same drive.

 

[StaticV]

If you have Vista or 7 it's better to use symbolic links instead of a junction. This way they don't have to be on the same drive.

Symbolic links didn't seem to work for me, it would just give me an error saying the device was inaccessible even though the link was on the same hard drive. If you can get it to work though I'd be happy to add it. If anyone else would like to try, simply remove the "/J" from the mklink command.