back up main folders

which folder should I back up in order to fully recover my routes when reinstalled

At a minimum, All of your User Data folders. (Note that it is best to name these yourself with a descriptive name so that you know exactly what those folders represent. Don't accept program suggested auto-generated names like 'Build xyz4590' etc.)



I call mine 'UserData' and place that on my fastest SSD drive and point the program to that as the 'Local Data folder' in Trainz settings.
(Recommend getting it out of your C:\Users\[username]\AppData\local\N3V Games\ folder on C: Drive).
My program files are in C:\TRS2019 and the user data/ packages ones are in a sub-directory of that: i.e. in C:\TRS2019\UserData, since my boot drive is my fastest SSD, which also has ample space for both the Operating System, my program files and TRS19.

In general, however, I'd recommend COPYING all of the Trainz Program folders AND the Userdata folders to another HDD or external Drive to create a fairly bulletproof backup system.
Do this whenever you're about to patch a version or whenever you've made some significant changes to your routes and sessions.

If something goes wrong, then all you need to do is to copy the entire set of folders back to your usual drive to recover your work.

Thanks, verry much

can you do this without delete the chump files? also is there a way to remove Content Files that not needed and later on copy them back, I see where you can export them as cdp file but would just remove the kuid and later on copy it back

jerry19 said:

can you do this without delete the chump files? also is there a way to remove Content Files that not needed and later on copy them back, I see where you can export them as cdp file but would just remove the kuid and later on copy it back

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Yup there's no need to touch anything and just copy the folders in one shebang to another location. It's not recommended to do a selective backup this way because everything integrates. The alternative is as you said to back up the data to CDPs. I do this for routes, sessions, and custom content. The rest of the content is either available on my backup drive since I save all my downloads, or on the DLS.

wilwi said:

which folder should I back up in order to fully recover my routes when reinstalled

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Copy the folder that shows in TRAINZ/settings/install. It maybe called build*********. You can change the name from build to something else if you want.

Thanks for the info, Got trainz 2004 when it first came out and use it a lot, on trainz 2019 will take a while to get it right

jerry19 said:

Thanks for the info, Got trainz 2004 when it first came out and use it a lot, on trainz 2019 will take a while to get it right

Click to expand...

I did as well. It was so much fun then!

Yeah everything is locked up in a database today so it's not as easy was it was with TRS2004 when we could have direct access to the data folders to make changes. It was much easier then for us, but was a lot slower for the program to access because Trainz had to search for content all the time. Starting with TRS2006 and up, the data is now in a database that references the content folders. This means that the content is loaded faster not only for us in Surveyor and Content Manager, but also within Driver as well. With these improvements, came the price we pay for complexity and the data compression, which allows data to load faster.

Managing the data isn't difficult, but it requires a bit of different thinking than before.