Route Building - Undocumented Back Up Feature?

Vern

Trainz Maverick
If, like me, you have ever deleted a partially completed route out of boredom, anger and/or frustration along with any back up cdp files then a month or two later wished you hadn't, then fear not. It appears that Trainz, certainly TRS2006 but presumably the other versions too, creates silent back-ups deep within the User folder.

I discovered this entirely by accident when doing a search on the name of an old route in which I wanted to check how I mixed some textures. No luck finding the cdp's which I must have deleted but it did provide a string of sequentially dated folders (all with nice gobbldeygook p4ph55dfg type names) several sub folders deep in the User folder. These contained all the gnd etc. files necessary to import the content. After running the folder through cmp and collecting missing assets from the DLS, behold! A route previously consigned to Oblivion back up and ready to be worked on. There's a couple of other projects I started and deleted such as one based on BC Rail which now have the potential to be resurrected. Dilemna now is do I work on the new route I started or go back to these older projects? One way or another, enough to keep me occupied for a good few months.

Who knows, maybe the TS2009 route I started but mysteriously reverted itself back to the raw state is in there somewhere.

The only caveat to this is how many of these back-up folders are created for each route? If it's every time you work on it, then the hard drive could get filled quite quickly. Maybe one of the Auran techs could enlighten us?
 
When building a route I used to use the auto-save function. Unfortunately it repeatedly crashes the simulator and the database. I hope SP2 has fixed that.
 
Further to my original post, I could only find the one route backed up, not the others I abandoned.

Baureihe - re your crashes, are these the grey/black screen crashes which you usually have to reboot out of (and usually leaves your desktop at the resolution Trainz was running in)? I've started getting these at frequent intervals and in TRS2006 too. Tried updating my graphics drivers but only the Dell ones work properly with the laptop and I already had the latest one installed anyway (which appears to be several versions behind the Nvidia reference drivers). I thought the problem was originally confined to TS2009 but it seems to be afflicting TRS2006 as well.

I will try shutting off auto-save and see if that cures the problem but I'm sure it didn't in TS2009 so probably not in TRs2006 either. Unfortunately if the crashes get any more frequent I'm going to have to consider whether it's worth continuing with the routes if it means a hard reboot every time TRS crashes.
 
Further to my original post, I could only find the one route backed up, not the others I abandoned.

Baureihe - re your crashes, are these the grey/black screen crashes which you usually have to reboot out of (and usually leaves your desktop at the resolution Trainz was running in)? I've started getting these at frequent intervals and in TRS2006 too. Tried updating my graphics drivers but only the Dell ones work properly with the laptop and I already had the latest one installed anyway (which appears to be several versions behind the Nvidia reference drivers). I thought the problem was originally confined to TS2009 but it seems to be afflicting TRS2006 as well.

I will try shutting off auto-save and see if that cures the problem but I'm sure it didn't in TS2009 so probably not in TRs2006 either. Unfortunately if the crashes get any more frequent I'm going to have to consider whether it's worth continuing with the routes if it means a hard reboot every time TRS crashes.

It is not the same type of crash. I have a hard CTD when the auto-save crashes. I also have the latest driver for de graphics card installed. The is no faulty content ( according to cm2 ) in the route. It is a tad big with detailed scenery so perhaps that is the cause of the CTD. To add to this CTD is that also during normal "save" the route crashes repeatedly, leaving me wasting many hours of work. As long as I don't try to save the route the simulator runs very smoothly.
 
I perpetually re-write, and constantly update a route on 2 RW-DVD's, and save it as a CDP. The purpose of the 2 RW-DVD's is in case one route gets corrupted.
 
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My Trainz (in Vista, that is) has a bad habit of crashing while exiting most of the time. I've grown to live with, but I manually save before exiting instead of using 'save and exit'.

Cheerio,
Nicholas.
 
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