PSA: "Create a Backup" of your world before updating eg to 1.17.2.

[Professor Dragon]

Please "Create a Backup" of your Vintage Story world, before running the update to 1.17.2

In general, this piece of advice applies to any software update (Not just Vintage Story, nor this version) - you should always have a backup of data before a change.

I'm not highlighting any particular problem with this update. It should work fine.

However, this is just what could be thought of as "good practice":

• What if something happens that shouldn't?
• What if you don't like one of the changes?
• How can I revert to what I was just on?

So I thought I'd just put this post into this "Questions" thread, even though it might fall into "Discussions" better - just because this might be where people look prior to an upgrade.

How to take a Backup of your World

1) From the main game menu, click on the Edit "pencil" icon to the right of your world.

2) Choose the "Create a backup" of your Vintage Story world.

Note: Do NOT use "Save" for this process, use "backup."
I believe that while I think that the file created is technically identical with either method, the key difference is that the Backup is shunted out to its own folder, keeping it "safe."
The "Save" will be overwritten the next time you play Vintage Story.

Note the "Filename on disk." This is what will be created.

3) "Confirm" that you want to create the backup.

4) Check that you have the "Ok, backup created" message at the bottom of the screen, that indicates a successful backup.

NOTE: There is no "progress bar" to indicate that a backup is occurring. So if your world is big and/or system slow, nothing will appear to be happening for a minute. This is normal.

5) There should now be a vcdbs file with that name in your Users folder (if using defaults).

Note. This is a different location to your "Saves" folder, which is typically (on Windows) under your User name folder at \AppData\Roaming\VintagestoryData\Saves.

 

6) Now, put this backup file somewhere safe.

On a removable drive, left at a relatives house, or to the cloud, or however you like to protect your data.

No, really. We've all done it. We've all lost data. Don't be that person. Not again.

 

Recovering from a Backup or Save File

I believe that the process is as simple as:

1) Have the right version of Vintage Story installed as the Save file.

For example, if your Save File is v1.16.5, then you'll need to be a v1.16.5 version of Vintage Story, not 1.17.

See below for running multiple copies of Vintage Story if this is not the case.

2) Place the Save/Backup file in the "Saves" folder and restart Vintage Story.
Typically (on Windows) under your User name folder at \AppData\Roaming\VintagestoryData\Saves.

https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php?title=Vintagestory_folder

 

Running Multiple Versions of Vintage Story

If you've moved to v1.17 (for example) and want to move back to v1.16.5, then you've got two options:

1) Uninstall the last version, and reinstall the older version.

2) Run two copies of Vintage Story.

This is not the main focus of this post, so I'll just put out some links to people who've covered this before.

 

Or for those are visual learners:

 

 

I hope that helps.

Professor Dragon.

EDIT - 5th Sep 2022

Mod. files and the rest of the installation

Please note that the above instructions are for saving your * * * data * * *.

That is, your world, and everything in it. It assumes that you can download whatever else you need (Vintage Story install files, Mods and so on).

If you want to make a backup of Mods, then you will need to backup your Mods. folder: %appdata%/VintagestoryData/Mods
https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php?title=Adding_mods
You can, of course, always download Mods again later, but sometimes it helps to have a complete backup.
People managing a multi-player server should see here: https://wiki.vintagestory.at/index.php?title=Adding_mods

And if you want to backup ALL of Vintage Story, that is something else again. This post is not really geared towards telling you how to do that, but at a minimum two key places to check out are:

1) Your game folder.
This will be the folder level that has "Vintagestory.exe" and all related files and folders from that level down.

2) The %appdata%/VintagestoryData/ folder and all related files and folders from that level down.

However, there are also Registry entries created, which is why I really don't want to get into this, in this post.

To stick to the key point - back up your world data as in the main post, and you'll be fine.
Most other things can be recovered from other sources.    

Edited September 5, 2022 by Professor Dragon

[Streetwind]

This might make for a useful sticky topic

[Sara Bell]

As I am seeing several players having issues on this subject, I am very grateful that you took the time to post this. Thank you and Game on!

[ible]

This would be a useful guide in the wiki, I highly encourage you create a wiki user account and put your knowledge there, rather than in the forum.