An excuse to visit Surveyor!

Nothing quite like a hupe computer crash (shorted pci cable, much smoke) to check your content on the dls.
Loads of missing/unknown content on the main route/session - frustration for people downloading.
The session also has duplicated assets from the route, maybe a merge after a cockup in the past.

Now if I didn't love Trainz so much it would have been a disaster - so off to Surveyor I go....
Clean-up required.

Note to self - CDPs on a external drive in future.

And while I'm at it, is there a way of backing up the instructions/settings for the many consists and industries? which will lead to a clean session.

What I do is backup the build folder in full. Then I use Solway's Plain Backup to back up any files that have changed. This saves having to do a complete save each time as it checks what has changed and adds the new files.

I use Fast Copy to back up nearly everything but the OS copies files as it no encryption so the backups are readable
Set to look for files with a date or file size changes
So it only backs up things that are new or modified after the first run
back up to an internal HDD weekly and an external HDD fortnightly
Saved me a lot of headaches over the years

Just keep it simple and buy a 256 or 512 GB HDD or SSD you can carry around with you to store content files, and organization is important.

Ghost42 said:

Note to self - CDPs on a external drive in future.

Click to expand...

I backup to two external drives, an external cloud storage (OneDrive) and an NAS device. You can call me paranoid but I have no worries.

Ghost42 said:

And while I'm at it, is there a way of backing up the instructions/settings for the many consists and industries? which will lead to a clean session.

Click to expand...

Those settings are saved in the Session. Backup your current Session and then reload the Route without the Session. This will set all the industry and consist properties to their default values.

If you have your consists in a Session layer (which is recommended for TRS19 PE, Trainz Plus and I presume TRS22) then temporarily move all the consists into their own Route layer first. Backup the Session and the Route (which will now have the consists) then reload the Route. All the consists will be returned to their default loads and can be moved back into a Session layer.

My advice.

Thanks for all the advice, important stuff now on an external device plus Onedrive is almost full.
A new cable has arrived and the video card is showing no ill effects.

You are very lucky indeed!

I lost a computer because a power supply blew up in a similar fashion. It killed the motherboard, video card, bricked one drive and damaged another. The damaged drive had my active Trainz content on it. I saw the data, but as soon as I went to access it, it all disappeared never to return. After that, I could no longer access the drive even from another computer. Dead! It's a good thing I had backups and the hardware was still cheap enough to buy at the time.

External drives aren't that expensive these days, at least still compared to other parts. I recently purchased an 8 TB Seagate Backup Plus Desktop drive for about $150. I backup my Trainz content to that drive often along with other data, downloads, and documents.

For my backup purposes, I use a free program called Fast Copy. Fast Copy copies the data without going through the calculating mode first and this copies data very, very quickly. There are all kinds of backup options including differential by date, etc. I do a simple Copy to ensure I copy everything. With the fast program and very fast drive, I can copy my 2 TB of Trainz content in about 4 hours from my system to the external drive.