How to Backup Properly?
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I'm going to expand my dynasty league.
Want to make sure I have proper backup just in case, I screw up the league. I copied the league from the saved games to an external hard drive. Posted a screenshot of the league file folder I copied to the external hard drive. Will this give me a reliable backup? Also used the game database backup and saved all files (see screenshot). Will this enable me to restore the database backup if I damage the league files in expanding my league? Sorry, I'm not good with computers and tech procedures. Would appreciate your help and expertise. |
Here's what I do. In the saved games folder I take my league.lg folder, and copy it to a .zip folder. Then cut/paste the .zip folder over to the external hard drive in a folder called "OOTP saved games" or whatever you want to call it. If you want to update the backup at the end of your playing day, copy your .lg folder to a .zip folder. Cut/paste it to the "OOTP saved games" folder. I think it asks you if you want to overwrite it, and you say yes, and then the league is up to date on the external drive.
When you need to use the .zip folder of your game on your external drive, you can change the name of the game, that you (I assume) need to go back in because something got messed up, to my league (1).lg, and then you won't overwrite it to make sure you don't delete it until you're sure you want to. Then extract the .zip folder from the external drive to your Documents > Out of the Park Developments > OOTP Baseball 20 > saved_games folder, and you're all set up with your game back to the date you want it to be at. :) Any questions? Fire away. |
Sorry, actionjackson, but you are dealing with a tech dunce.
I'm sure your method is the best way to do it. But you lost me with zip folder... I have no idea what that is... or how to do it... and I don't expect you to teach me how to do it. Would my method in post #1 backup the league?... I can do what I posted. (screenshot #1) Will the Game Backup do the job? (screenshot #2) |
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The first method and second method basically do the same thing - make a copy of the saved game somewhere else. There's absolutely no reason why you can't do both - redundancy is a good thing. If you need to quickly go back you can use the in-game functionality. If a catastrophe occurs and the hard drive in your computer becomes unreadable, you have the copy on the external drive. |
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Thank you. Appreciate actionjackson, too.... sorry I'm just not too smart with computers. |
RCHW made a great post a couple years back .... thhe real stuff starts at post 5, with pictures ....
hope it helps... https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...97#post4084018 |
Slightly OT but still relevant - I see a lot about having zipped folders and stuff for backups. I have a backup of my save that doesn't have any of that - it was a straight copy/paste from my computer to my external hard drive when I was backing up my computer. Does that change anything when restoring a backup from that hard drive?
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Zipping the backup league file just compresses the file to save space. You don't need to do that (and then you don't have to unzip the backup file before restoring it).
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A special thanks to all of you fine folks.
OOTPB Community is a special place because of wonderful people like you who are willing to help people like me. I had no major trouble expanding my North Island Dynasty League. Still have a few things to work out... the playoffs didn't work well... it is a six-team league... an Association with three other leagues... I wanted to have the first place teams play for the overall championship, but the custom playoffs did not give me that choice. It required the use of wildcards, which I don't want to include. If I unchecked "wildcards", it would not allow me to do that. I'm going back over the whole setup and see if I missed something somewhere. If I have to, I can use the wildcards... give a bye to the pennant winner and have the 2nd and 3rd place teams play in the first round. Much appreciate all of you. |
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Wish I could help with the playoffs thing, but I pretty much stay within the confines of an MLB setup, so I don't know much about four sub-league setups. I do send the top two teams from the AL and the NL to the postseason if I'm playing anywhere from 1901 through 1992. I don't use divisions either. I just take the top two teams up to 1992, and the top four teams thereafter, so I'm familiar with using the Custom Playoffs feature, just not with the way you're trying to use it. I never go above 8 teams total making the playoffs, and I never go to two 15 team subleagues, because as far as I'm concerned Interleague games can die in a fire any day now. The non-1st place teams will be called "wild cards" by the game, even though I don't like to call them that because I put them on an even footing with the 1st place teams, have them duke it out, and may the best team win. I seed them all by Win%, and then have them re-seeded at the start of each subsequent round, so that the best team always gets home field in series' that are always best of seven regardless of the length of those series IRL. Sorry I can't be of more help, but maybe something in there will jog something for you that you'll be able to carry into your game to make it work. |
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I think you and I play the game a lot alike... I love 8-team leagues... can't stand modern baseball with its 5-team divisions... don't like wildcards, either. Just give me the good old days before free agency and the AL champ against the NL champ... money has ruined baseball... "you can't tell the players without a scorecard anymore"... they change teams too often. |
Since I'm having trouble setting up the playoffs in my league expansion, I'm going to schedule a tournament at the end of the seasons between my four league winners.
I got some great advice in another thread about this. Here's the link: https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=308329 |
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We disagree on free agency (which is fine), as my philosophy is that I don't go to the games/watch them on TV to see the owners. I want to see the players. With $10+ Billion (and climbing every season) coming into the game (an average of $333,333,333.33 per team), I think the players deserve around 50% of that as they're the ones putting their bodies on the line. Without free agency, they wouldn't come close to 50%, and I don't find that fair. To suppress player salaries would mean the owners would be making money hand over fist at the expense of the players. That ain't right to me. If there weren't sooo much money coming in, maybe the reserve clause would make sense, but I'd still see that as quite restrictive when it comes to players' rights. The players are the game after all. :) |
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The downside of OOTP's backup system is that incremental backups are stored using the default league file name, ie. myspecialleague.lg. What would be very nice of OOTP to do would be for them to extract the league date at the time of back up and offer to add it such that you would have the date added, say, myspecialleague_2104_4_30.lg as a choice. Then you could backup continuously with zero concern by date. I do this manually. After each incremental backup I go to the backup folder and add the date via file rename then go back into the game and do an all files backup that acts as the base for the next incremental one. Typically I do one per month but you could set any frequency you want depending on free disk space.
I delete most if not all of the incremental dated backups at seasons end but I do also use 7Zip to store multiple years of backups to a remote network drive. I save ST, opening day, Sep rosters, end of season, end of playoffs and Dec 31/Jan 1 each; where I delete thousands of files via a dos batch file to reduce the .lg file to a manageable size on Jan 1 xxxx. This for two long running saves! I have several terabytes of such backups:o 7zip is easy to use. Maybe a tutorial using real OOTP leagues is in order in a separate thread. |
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I remember several years ago, I tried to restore my game from the backup and it was up-to-date... couldn't use it... it wouldn't load up.
Luckily I had a backup on my external hard drive, but I lost 4 years of the league... went back to the 52nd year and just replayed them, the missing four seasons. My Islandian Pro Alliance has almost 5 millions items in it covering 61 years of the 64-team league. Tried to back it up recently on an external hard drive... it took 15 hours to reach the 75% mark and then said there was an error and it wouldn't continue. So I'm in trouble... don't have an up-to-date backup. Hope the game backup works better than the last time I tried to use it... that all I have. |
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My wife is getting a new computer... I'm going to get the IT guy to show me how to zip and unzip files. |
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1) Right-click on the .lg folder in your saved_games folder that you want to compress (put into a .zip file) 2) Click on "Send to" 3) Click on "Compressed (zipped) folder" |
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Once you've clicked on "Compressed (zipped) folder", your computer will start to compress your .lg folder...It should look like this...
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Once that's done (shouldn't take too long, but your .lg folder is very large, so it will take longer than anything I'm used to), you should see two copies of your .lg folder. The regular .lg folder itself, and a .lg folder that is compressed (zipped)...
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Much obliged, actionjackson. About 15 years or so, a young 15-year-old fella named Dbacks taught me how to post a screenshot on my IPA Dynasty League Report of the OOTP Dynasty Forum... he gave me "detailed instructions". He did it with pictures... I'll never forget how he began the instructions: Dbacks posted in the very first post "a screenshot of a cursor"... actually at that time, Dbacks didn't have to begin at such a rudimentary and elementary level... EC "already" had gained that extensive knowledge that that little "arrow-looking thing" was known technically as a "cursor". He circled the "cursor" in red to help me out. Yes, Dbacks was my kind of teacher. And yes, I have been taught by the best... actionjackson now joins the ranks of tech scholars, gurus and geniuses on this Forum. Dbacks also made me some logos, too... I think I'm still using them in the Islandian Pro Alliance. Hope he is doing well... he was fine young lad... so is actionjackson. |
The key benefit of 7Zip is that it creates a single file which is much faster to copy to an external source. Copy and paste on an ootp league folder of 50,000-80,000 files can take more than a day since each small txt file must be copied just like the larger files one at a time. One duplicate file can stop the process if you are not there.
I'll do a 7Zip thread but not soon. Real life work has me out all week. |
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Now you want to take the compressed folder of your .lg folder and Cut/Paste it to your external hard drive in a folder that you keep your saved OOTP folders in. You know about this part, because this is the part that's taken sixteen hours to do, only to have it hang, and stop because it can't handle the load, or it says there's been an error. You want to Cut/Paste it rather than Copy/Paste it because Copy/Pasting will leave a copy of the compressed .lg folder behind in your saved_games folder.
When you want to reset your game because something happened in it that you don't like and you want to go back in time to do things over, you'll want to "extract" it from your external hard drive to your saved_games folder. When you do this, your computer will tell you that there's already a folder in the saved_games folder with that name, and ask you if you want to overwrite it or not. There are two things you can do: 1) Click on "yes" and overwrite the folder in question or 2) Prior to extracting it, rename the folder in question your league (1).lg instead of your league.lg. Option #2 will protect your .lg folder in your saved_games folder until you've determined that it's safe to delete it. Option #1 will simply overwrite the .lg folder, and your game will go back to where it was at the time of your previous save. The next four pics relate to the extraction process that I started talking about in paragraph #2. They're the four steps you need to take in order to reset your .lg folder. The first step shows games that are in my external hard drive saved games folder. You would right click on the game you wish to reset, and a menu will come up. One of the options will be "Extract All...". Left click on that. The next pic shows what happens next. You'll want to left click on the "Browse..." button (highlighted in blue). Using the "Browse" feature, you're gonna select where the extracted folder will end up, which is photo #3. Photo #4 shows the destination folder (your saved_games folder in OOTP20). At the bottom of the "Extract Compressed (Zipped) Folders" page, you'll see two buttons "Extract" and "Cancel". You'll want to left click on the "Extract" button, and it'll either ask you if you want to overwrite (to which you say yes), or start extracting immediately (if decided to change the name of your .lg folder to protect it from being overwritten). This is all probably overwhelming as hell, but just keep asking questions and I'm pretty confident we can get you to the point where you'll be able to do this. |
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You can find the 7-Zip program that Rich is talking about here. Use the 19.00 download link, as the other one is an alpha version. You want the most recent stable version, and if it's an alpha version, it's still in the testing stage. If you have an x64 (64-bit) computer, use the x64 download link. If you have an x86 (32-bit) computer, use the x86 download link. Download and install it.
When you want to use 7-Zip to open/take a look at your .zip file, follow these instructions (mine is already set up to use 7-Zip, so I'm gonna try and get your 'puter set up to use it): 1) Right-click on the file in question 2) Left-click on "Open with" 3) Left-click on "Choose another app" (unless 7-Zip is already set up, but it probably won't be) 4) Left-click on "More apps" 5) Another list of potential apps will pop up, but it probably won't even be listed there, so Left-click on "Look for another app on this PC" 6) It should take you to your "Program Files" folder. Look for the "7-Zip" folder, which should be at or near the top of the list. Left click on it 7) Left click on "7zFM" (7-Zip File Manager) 8) You'll also want to check the "Always use this app for files of this type" box in the "Choose another app menu" to make this a permanent change (pic #2 underneath "More apps") Questions? :) |
actionjaction, thanks for taking the time to post this information. I have written many test procedures and programs so I know it can be difficult to convey what you know well so others will understand. I have written tutorials for OOTP and other games so I appreciate the effort. I just wish the admins would create a tutorial and FAQ section so vital information could be easily found and the same questions would not be asked every year as I suggested in the past.
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Re redundancy; external hard drives are great - but they're not Dropbox or any other online storage. If your house burns down, the hard drive will melt as well. Once you've twiddled with a league for seven years you want some more security. To be REALLY sure, I should stash a second USB stick with a friend. I mean, what's the chance that both our houses burn down AND Dropbox goes out of business? |
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I hope he is blessed with an abundant and happy life. Thanks for sharing the note with me... much appreciate it. |
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