OneDrive Backups.

[Oberoten]

We have all been there sometime. The computer dies and with it goes a LOT of work especially if you like me develop rulesets for your games. (And yes, I have shamefully been hogging them lately and not really sharing them as much as I used to.)

Most people have a OneDrive, GoogleDrive or similar cloud-storage option available. Now I figured that I should look over how to make FG autosynch to the cloud. (How I hate that word, really. I loathe buzzwords)

I decided to use OneDrive since I get 1 Tb of storage there with my office subscription.

You can either just move your FG-data folder into your OneDrive folder and point FG there in the settings. OR you can go the slightly insane way I went at first... Move Data folder and create a symbolic link, with the command prompt in Administrator mode : mklink <OldFGFolderPath> <OneDrivePath> and you are set. The later method can be a solution if you have a lot of other programs that you use to edit/search/create content outside of FG itself.

- Obe (Who will hopefully never lose his player data again. )

[dulux-oz]

And yes, I have shamefully been hogging them lately and not really sharing them as much as I used to.

Well?

Now that you've confessed you'd better get to it then, shouldn't you!?!

Come on... pleeeeaase

I'll give you the One Ring that Draca gave to me (when he actually get's around to giving it to me, that is (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?25822-Community-Links-for-Mundane-and-low-magic-items-for-Dungeons-Shops-and-Pockets&p=229013&viewfull=1#post229013))

[damned]

You can either just move your FG-data folder into your OneDrive folder and point FG there in the settings. OR you can go the slightly insane way I went at first... Move Data folder and create a symbolic link, with the command prompt in Administrator mode : mklink <OldFGFolderPath> <OneDrivePath> and you are set. The later method can be a solution if you have a lot of other programs that you use to edit/search/create content outside of FG itself.

- Obe (Who will hopefully never lose his player data again. )

You are quite likely to lose your data again this way...
OneDrive and other Sync apps have the potential to try to Sync while FG is trying to Save and causing a corruption in the file. There are at least a half dozen posts where a GM has corrupted his campaign file while having it reside in a cloud sync location.

If you manually zip up your particular campaign or your particular ruleset directory periodically into the OneDrive folder you will have an effective (albeit manual) backup that wont increase the chances of DB corruption...

[Trenloe]

As damned says - this is *not* recommended. There have been quite a few examples where FG data has got corrupted using a sync app on live FG data. Do a backup of your data occasionally when FG is not running, but don't point a sync app directly at your FG data folder.

[Nylanfs]

You could setup a batch file to regularly copy the campaign folder into your sync location.

[Moon Wizard]

This^ is what I do.

JPG

[Oberoten]

Hmm. I will make sure to pause OneDrive while we run sessions.

[darrenan]

I would say it's not worth the risk (as I'm one of those that experienced data loss as mentioned above), but you have been warned ;-) Manually zipping up your campaigns directory is pretty painless.

[Griogre]

Also just because you lose *your* data doesn't mean the player data is all gone. I've had a problem like that before. Just make sure you name you replacement campaign something different than the lost one and tell you players to go into manage characters and export the character from their cache for the old campaign and send it to you. :)

[Oberoten]

Truth to be told, I worry less about campaign data than about ruleset data and extensions.

[darrenan]

Really? You'd rather have a whole campaign go down the toilet, instead of running an FG update and downloading a few files from the forums?

[damned]

Really? You'd rather have a whole campaign go down the toilet, instead of running an FG update and downloading a few files from the forums?

Obe does a lot of ruleset development and THAT takes time :)

[Oberoten]

Per example with the last crash I lost about a month of evening work.

[snafuperman]

I was also considering going this route Oberoten. My search led me to this thread. I wanted to see if you still felt the same 5 months on? Have you experienced any problems? Thanks for any input.

[Trenloe]

I was also considering going this route Oberoten. My search led me to this thread. I wanted to see if you still felt the same 5 months on? Have you experienced any problems? Thanks for any input.
Even if Oberton hasn't had any issues there have been other users who have reported issues. We can't recommend strongly enough that you *shouldn't* use any cloud sync solution like OneDrive for your FG app data. You may get lucky, or you may not - it just have to happen once for it to be potentially a major issue and you lose your campaign data.

[snafuperman]

Noted and appreciated Trenloe. I'm leaning towards *not* doing it due to your's and other's warnings throughout the forums. If I was to do it, however, my plan would be to set up a batch file that would always close Onedrive prior to even opening FG. The batch file to open means that I would be less likely to "forget" to turn off the service prior to launching FG. However, as others have pointed out, it is also possible to simply back up the appropriate directories after exiting. Not as convenient, but likely what I will choose as the safer option. I consider myself warned, regardless. Thanks for your diligence.

[ianmward]

Of course, the best solution would be to use a highly distributed backup system.
By sharing your work more frequently, we can all help backup your data for you ;-)

On a more serious note, I use BitBicket as a network source control system. If you commit and push your changes at the end of every evening of development, you know it's safe. It also has many other benefits, including allowing you to more easily see how your last change broke everything:-)


Per example with the last crash I lost about a month of evening work.