SSDs and Trainz and Backing Up....

Last major system upgrade I installed two SSDs, one a dedicated system disk and the other a dedicated Trainz disk.

It's all been good - really good, best bang for my Trainz buck ever! The load times are just awesome and combined with trainzoptions tweaks of relatively low -framerate coupled with a high -framestoaverage video is super-smooth. Love it!

Did I say it had all been good? Well almost all....

My morning routine is to fire up the computer on my way to the kitchen, make breakfast, then come back to the computer and peruse the forum over toast and tea. A couple of weeks ago I came back with brekkie to find a blue DOS screen furiously running a boot-induced chkdsk and deleting file after file - pages and pages and pages of 'corrupt' files deleted. Which drive? Trainz drive.

Oops.

Actually I think I said something else at the time, but 'oops' will do!

Off to see the local computer guru. He got the thing running and after 8 hours and about 6 BSOD crashes he managed to get what was left of 'Local' copied onto a conventional drive. Local was running about 100 Gb before the issue, copied version was 80-ish. 20 gig of content gone? No - it's worse than that - chkdsk deletes FILES not folders, so 20 gig of random FILES deleted out of 100 gig of content.

I back up my own content, but I never thought to back up the whole Local folder - I do now.

The point of this rambling essay isn't 'woe is me', actually cleaning up Local and working out what is worth keeping and what was probably unnecessary clutter is not without some merit. Problem is it's a never ending asset-by-asset manual slog through the wreckage of my Trainz world. A comprehensive Local back-up would have saved me a world of grief - hard disk storage is ridiculously cheap - and there is no reason for you guys and gals to not learn from my mistake.

Turns out that although SSD's are bomb proof, drop proof, and drag-through-the-dirt proof 'unexplained' catastrophic failures of this sort are actually not uncommon.

Be warned....

Upside? The replacement SSD is bigger and was FREE! Of course, the 8 hours of guru time wasn't!

Andy...

Hi Andy,

Good to hear you did same me! My 2nd ssd intel 520i bought last or 2 month ago in think. Best buy ever,one for only win7 64b and the other for trainz only. Backups n the old 1tb sata drives.
You talk abotu lowaveage fps and frametoaverage what setting you tested so I can test on my routes and let you know how that worked. What ssd you have for trainz? Mine intel 520 480gb very fast and absolute reliable n more defrag etc etc and optimize takes less than a minute.
ssd brings more than drams with trainz if you ask me. I use 6gb drams but think more would not benefit trainz what is your take?
Dear friend have a good one and enjoy breakfast like us every morning at 5am selecting picts to share with our trainers friends world wide.


Have a great weekend,

Roy

Actually to be safe you need the Local and Original folders.
I use a file sync program and sync the SSD Userdata and sub folders with a copy on a normal HD, also a cloned copy of the OS SSD on a bootable partition any problem just change the boot order. The file sync takes about 20 minutes or so and closes the PC when it's finished, so I just do it last thing at night, if I've been editing adding or creating anything. Second copy runs exactly as the SSD one just loads a lot slower, doing the whole userdata folder ensures all setting are exactly the same as well as no assets missing. I also every few days sync it with a copy on another PC, may be paranoid but having lost about 5 years work in 1999 I did on a FPS I was trying to write by accidentally installing a Linux distribution on top of it and then discovering that my backup drive decided to fail on me, I tend to over backup everything now. Disk order in that particular Linux was being seen differently to Windows, effectively it ignored the bios and did it's own detection. More careful now as are the later Linux installers.

Hi Malc

What back-up utility do you use? I've been looking for something that sincs new and modified files/folders and comes with good English language instructions, not just two lines of geek-speak! And yes. I did harp on 'local' but I'd be backing up the rest also

@ Roy

Try
-framerate=22
-framestoaverage=16

-framerate can be experimented with. About 30 is as high as it ever needs to go, but 22 is a good starting point. Don't change -framestoaverage though, leave it at 16...

Andy

Dermmy said:

Hi Malc

What back-up utility do you use? I've been looking for something that sincs new and modified files/folders and comes with good English language instructions, not just two lines of geek-speak! And yes. I did harp on 'local' but I'd be backing up the rest also

Click to expand...

Found it on sourceforge, FreeFileSync, Syncs both ways or just mirrors which is what we need it for. http://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/

Watch the installer though as there is a junkware option you need to deselect. No problems with it here, one of the best synchronising programs I've used, its capable of quite a lot

Or if you want simple that works and does the job there's Microsofts SyncToy http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15155 I used that for backing up stuff in the past on an older setup.

I use Fastcopy.

http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en

The download from Vector for the 64-bit version is on a Japanese website. It is still safe to download. The program is free.

The program has the nice ability to just copy the data with various options, like synching, overwriting, full copy, etc., without the usual Windows calculating the size first.

You set the destination and source, increase your buffer size and that's it.

Malc -- I learned too the hard way after losing about 86GB of data. Fortunately, my Trainz install was on an inactive drive. My boot and my backup drive were hosed.

John

I had the same issue, but with a conventional HDD... I booted the computer, walked away to the kitchen came back and found it deleting tons of files...WOOPS....It then booted as this was on the trainz drive, and to my dismay EVERYTHING was gone, except a tattered local folder with about 2 folders in it, with no files in either...kinda Ironic....Then I tried doing a file recovery, which did infact recover files, but since it does files and not folders, it came back with 50000000 config.txts and a billion other random textures etc...