[Tony M]

Suggestion

Store contract history, injury history, trade history and movement history against a player in the players.dat file.

Reason

As stated by battists above, the in-game backup feature only does a certain amount. Some things are recorded only in the text files and not in the database.

It should be possible to implement a new structure in the player record and put it after the Leaderboard structures to record these four items. If the text files are lost they could be recreated from the file.

The contract structure could be based on the structure already present in a player record with the addition of a field for the date it was signed.

The injury structure would consist of date injury occurred, injury id, DL15 flag, DL60 flag, DTD flag, CEI flag, SEI flag, expected recovery time, date injury finished.

The trade structure would be similar to that in the trades.dat file listing the date of the trade, other team and all the players, cash and draft-picks included in it. If by default the game stored all transactions for all the time, this structure could just be a link to that trade ID

The movement structure would list all roster moves the player made. Date of move, from team id, to team id, type of move (eg, purchased, optioned, promoted, demoted, placed on active roster, placed on waivers, placed on DFA, etc)

Priority

Medium-High (would build in more resilience for backups)