Local folder - the agony of copying and moving!

For the first time in years, I'm copying over the whole of my 'local' folder to an external hard drive as preparation for migrating to the new PC that arrived today.

It's taken the better part of 12 hours to copy over, a surprise seeing I thought I'd only got about 25GB of stuff in there!

Is this comparable with others' experience of copying the local folder outside of the hard drive where it was originally located?

I wish we had a neat way of compressing the local folder to make it more manageable when we need to copy it or move it to other locations. For example, if we could temporarily turn it into a .ja file and then move it somewhere else. Or have I misunderstood how .ja files work?

Paul

The copying of a large local folder is a lengthy task, governed more by windows than Trainz. Mine is 271GB and it takes all day and night. Thats only half the task as when you re-instal you will require to carry out a database repair. If you are upgrading from an earlier Trainz version this can take almost as long.

Just get it started, preferably just before bed and let it run. Good time also to catch up on the chores you've been avoiding.

ja files are builtins and part of the Trainz version. The later the version the more builtins as this also contains all the legacy builtins for compatibility purposes. These are controlled by Auran.

Anything not a builtin goes in the local folder.

Couldn't agree more about the need for some method of transferring large local folders.

:wave:

QUOTE : Just get it started, preferably just before bed and let it run. Good time also to catch up on the chores you've been avoiding.
I agree its the best way to back up the loacal folder as well which i do every Saturday Night.

Quote : Mine is 271GB and it takes all day and night.
I thought i was Mad haveing 140GB+ But in saying that i have copyed my Local folder from each Version when i upgrade

If you're copying a large volume of data robocopy (a command line tool available in the Windows Resource Kit) will do a far more efficient job of it than either Windows Explorer or xcopy.

We use it for mirroring drives for backup purposes, and it's as fast as you are likely to encounter. 25GB should copy in half an hour or so unless the drives are particularly slow (I run a 140GB copy from my laptop every night using robocopy and it takes about 3 hrs to complete).

Also remember with the advent of TS2009/10 that files and content are larger (for better texture details etc) so the problem will become worse as time goes on !!!

And I thought that my weekly backup of my Trainz 2009 directory was painfully slow at 37 min. Right now Ttrainz is only a scant 5.35 GB, but it continues to slowly grow. I can't imagine what you must have in your directory to have 270+ GB

Maybe an idea to adopt a good backup reime.

Backup everything once a month, then only backup the recently added items on a weekly basis.

Ground textures for example, can be 16Mb alone (each)

Also consider the load on Aurans servers when downloading !!

barn700 said:

Maybe an idea to adopt a good backup reime.

Backup everything once a month, then only backup the recently added items on a weekly basis.

Ground textures for example, can be 16Mb alone (each).

Click to expand...

Once a month? I run an automated back-up every night (using a pair of rotating USB drives). I've not lost any data yet, and I don't intend that to change.

If you use mirroring and incremental backups (both of which robocopy can do) it doesn't take anything as like as long as copying the lot since it will use the timestamps on each file to determine whether it actually needs to be copied.

FYI here's the command I use to mirror all files on my latop to an external drive:

robocopy c:\ u:\ /s /r:3 /w:5 /mir /xd "System Volume Information" /xf *.obj *.res *.idb *.ncb *.scc *.suo *.ilk *.dep

/s tells it to recurse subdirectories
/r is the retry count if a file is in use
/w is the wait time between retries
/mir tells it to mirror the source folder to the destination, adding or deleting files from the destination as required.
/xd gives a list of excluded folders
/xf gives a list of excluded file types

I hope that helps someone, somewhere. Although doing backups is a pain, if you don't do them very regularly the chances are that they won't be able to help when you need them.

Durhamlass,

Thank you for the tip on Robocopy. I forgot about that and didn't know it was installed as part of Vista and Windows 7.

....And I thought my 36 Gig of downloads was bad.

John

JCitron said:

Durhamlass,

Thank you for the tip on Robocopy. I forgot about that and didn't know it was installed as part of Vista and Windows 7.

....And I thought my 36 Gig of downloads was bad.

John

Click to expand...

Anytime John. I'm more careful about backups than most, but the end result is that I've never lost any data whereas many I know have and then come to me for advice when it's too late.

Backups are overrated. Why on Earth would you backup a gazillion GB's of DLS content when the DLS is in perfect health keeping it all safe for you :S
keep your downloaded non-dls items in a separate folder "downloads" with a sub-fodler called "newest" or something similar in which you download ALL your new items. Every now and then copy the items you have added from that folder to your back-up drive. Then MOVE the content in the newest folder to your downloads folder and you're done. Takes me all but 15 minutes a week.

this happened to me...

I was copying my local folder back into my newly reinstalled TS folder when somewhere along the line I initiated a copy of the entire(33GB) local folder into one of the local folders!

The result was that the local folder now showed 66GB.

I eventually found the bulging mislocated mess & deleted it.

I would suggest that 271GB of Trainz would have this issue involved It does not show in Content Manager that I remember, but if there are duplicated files in CM, opening in explorer will locate the problem.

Thanks for the command line tool!

Most of my DLS content is modified...the DLS is a server with several backups on different servers in various parts of the world, but as with any other Internet service is capable of being corrupted(God forbid!).

durhamlass said:

Anytime John. I'm more careful about backups than most, but the end result is that I've never lost any data whereas many I know have and then come to me for advice when it's too late.

Click to expand...

I'm also very paranoid about losing data, and having worked in the IT world for a long time, I still keep this in the back of my mind all the time. That level of worry never seems to go away even though the only thing I worry about backing up no is my own computer.

John

Baureihe41 said:

Backups are overrated. Why on Earth would you backup a gazillion GB's of DLS content when the DLS is in perfect health keeping it all safe for you...

Click to expand...

Not everybody has a Excellent working Version of the Content Manager, Mind you.

Sampug394 said:

Not everybody has a Excellent working Version of the Content Manager, Mind you.

Click to expand...

Which isn't needed either. Where do you read I am talking about the Content Manager anyway?

hi,
been looking at this thread
simple fix is start coping then go and do something
it's like grass growing the more you look at it the longer it will take
BTW i back up once a week
cheers n beers,
patchy

I like the Robocopy method...

Robocopy is the real bomb!

Using Windows Command Prompt you can customise a command that will copy all folders safely.

Then after you do the first copy, you can enter a command to only copy changes to the folders, or only new folders.

Robocopy is persistant & will restart where it left off if the power goes out, etc.