Hey all,
First, thank you for the help! I haven't tried recovering the route yet as I was busy battling a possessed new computer build that decided Murphy's Law just NEEDED to come into play (I can look back and laugh now, but at the time, bricks and bottles were manned and the computer was public enemy # 1). Now that I have that all sorted, I'm back to mucking about. I've decided to forgo trying to recover the route for 2 reasons. 1, it was a test route for all the new toys '19 has to offer, and second, it was just to jump in and go. Now that I have it outta my system, and have a bit more knowledge of what does what, I've moved on to a new route which is going pretty smooth. Just wanted to let everyone know that the help was greatly appreciated, and that it all worked out in the end. Cheers to all, and happy railroading!
SHO
I've encountered Mr. Murphy many times in my old tech career and at home. He works along with the LGM that come to visit and screw things up for us. Thinking about it now, I have threatened more than one computer with its demise which seemed to work. After contemplating using tin snips and a hack saw to cut up one motherboard, the computer suddenly worked fine. It makes me wonder if it got the hint!
Anyway. That sounds like a good plan for your route if that's what you want to do. Going forward, I recommend two things.
1) Put your data in another location other than C:/users/SHOPlanB/App Data/Local/N3V Games/Build xxxxxxx
I put mine on my E: Drive like this: E:\TRS19_DATA. How simple is that! It's a hard drive that's dedicated 99% to TRS19_DATA and being a 2TB hard drive there's plenty of space too for that.
The purpose of this is to give you a folder that's not only easily accessed for content repairs and installation, but also for backups which brings up the second point.
2) BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP.
This can't be stressed enough. There are various methods, but the simplest one is to copy the full data folder to an external hard drive such as those by Seagate or Western Digital. The drives go for about $120 for a good-sized drive now. I paid $130 for a 4-TB drive a few years ago so that could be even less now. I gave that drive to another Trainzer who needed one when I got a free 8TB drive from DELL.
I believe in KISS. I use a program called Fast Copy to copy the data to my external drive. I let it run over night and it's done in the morning. It does just that. It copies the folders, and allows for various parameters such as differential copying, etc. It doesn't do the calculating thing that Windows does before the copy, which can take as long as the actual copy process, and it just does an accelerated copy to the destination.
https://fastcopy.jp/en/