Oct / Nov '17 OUT OF Lite Challenge: Banned Island

[ThomasR]

That's gorgeous Joel !

[Redrobes]

I would advise keeping all your own work in a folder separate to anything which is controlled by windows. So have a fonts dir where you save the font download and then open up the font and install it to the windows fonts directory. Then when you come to back up your work you only need to back up your personal work. If you reinstall windows or do a system restore which is almost certainly what a repair guy would do then you still have all the fonts and you will need to reinstall them again but at least not need to go and fetch them off the internet. The same goes with app installs. Make an Installs dir on your personal area and then extract any app installer zips to there then install the app from there into its program files or whereever. Then back up your personal work area including the installers. One advantage of this is that when you upgrade the OS with patches esp Service Packs you often find that if you nuke the OS and go back to a state without them then new apps wont install unless you have service pack X installed or it will only install over an old copy of a certain version number (looking at you Firefox here). Sometimes getting that old version can be hard. If you have all the old installations saved away then you can go and install version 1 then install version 5 over the top of it. Doing it all under one personal folder means that you backup becomes one XCopy of that one dir to your USB external harddrive. So no special backup software required.

BTW: Map is coming along real great !

[- JO -]

this is looking really good, Jo! All of those elevation lines... they would be driving me nuts trying to do all of that!

Thanks ! It’s just a matter of taking your time, it’s less complicated than it looks

Oh poor Jo!

I do feel for you. I'd have been in the same situation with fonts and things if I'd had to reinstall Win 10 the other day

But despite it all you're doing brilliantly. I love the contours, and the paper texture looks much better now its showing in the land area as well as the sea

Thanks... those computer are, sometimes, a great waste of time, nerves and energy...
I'm glad you like the changes I've made with the paper !

That's gorgeous Joel !

Thanks Thomas ! I'm glad you lke it

I would advise keeping all your own work in a folder separate to anything which is controlled by windows. So have a fonts dir where you save the font download and then open up the font and install it to the windows fonts directory. Then when you come to back up your work you only need to back up your personal work. If you reinstall windows or do a system restore which is almost certainly what a repair guy would do then you still have all the fonts and you will need to reinstall them again but at least not need to go and fetch them off the internet. The same goes with app installs. Make an Installs dir on your personal area and then extract any app installer zips to there then install the app from there into its program files or whereever. Then back up your personal work area including the installers. One advantage of this is that when you upgrade the OS with patches esp Service Packs you often find that if you nuke the OS and go back to a state without them then new apps wont install unless you have service pack X installed or it will only install over an old copy of a certain version number (looking at you Firefox here). Sometimes getting that old version can be hard. If you have all the old installations saved away then you can go and install version 1 then install version 5 over the top of it. Doing it all under one personal folder means that you backup becomes one XCopy of that one dir to your USB external harddrive. So no special backup software required.

BTW: Map is coming along real great !

Thanks ! That’s a very good idea ! Does backup softwares have the same result ?
When I'll find more or less the configuration that I had, I consider using one of those special software... (As I've learned the hard way that the « backup » of windows is not a mirror image)

[Redrobes]

Thanks ! That’s a very good idea ! Does backup softwares have the same result ?
When I'll find more or less the configuration that I had, I consider using one of those special software... (As I've learned the hard way that the « backup » of windows is not a mirror image)

Backup software ? Probably ! I have never used backup software. I think that XCopy does a super job. You can set it to go through the directory tree looking at filesize & timestamp differences and copy over newer files and those files that dont exist. So if you keep all of your own work under one directory point then its a one line job to back it up which I make a little BAT file out of and then run that. Normally I might have a few more lines in that so cover some other important dirs too but its not huge. I have a temporary dir as well which I exclude from the backup.

You cant snapshot windows wholesale to make a backup. You can do a system snapshot and then your able to do a system restore later on if you have the snapshot file to hand. So this is used when you update drivers and other stuff which is very OS dependent. When you have trouble booting because its gone bad often you can go into safe mode and from there you can do a system restore to the last snapshot you made. Thats used when the OS is corrupted in some manner rather than losing your hard drive and data files. So its a good idea to make a snapshot when a) your system is working real well and b) when its ok and your just about to upgrade an important driver like the display driver.

If things go really pear shaped (bad) then I am usually happy to nuke the OS from orbit so long as I have all my data backed up. I am more concerned with all my work than windows files. Having the backup on an external HDD is always a good idea too. I made the mistake of having twin internal HDDs and backing up from one to the other. Fine until my power supply when boom and took out the whole machine and everything in it.

Make up a little BAT file and put in something like this:

xcopy E:\*.* U:\E_Drive /K /O /X /E /Y /D /C /R /F /H /EXCLUDE:xcopy_exclude_list.txt

where E:\ is your data drive which could also have been C:\MyData or whatever and U:\ is the USB drive.
xcopy_exclude_list.txt would be a plain text file in the same dir as the bat file something like:

E:\Temp
E:\MassiveUnusedDataStore
E:\AnotherUselessDir

xcopy used to be a standard command from the command line. Microsoft have a habit of deprecating these useful commands. But then, I have deprecated windows !

[- JO -]

Thanks a lot Redrobe !

Meanwhile, here's a little update for the map... lots of numbers too..

WIP

[Kier]

This is simply gorgeous. Reminds me so much of looking at my grandfathers nautical maps of the bay when we sailed.

[Bogie]

Great detail, it must have taken forever to add in all those water depth numbers.

[Bogie]

This is simply gorgeous. Reminds me so much of looking at my grandfathers nautical maps of the bay when we sailed.

Great Bay, or out in Portsmouth Harbor?

[ladiestorm]

Going back to RedRobes comment about the separate fonts folder. I've done that myself. I have a fonts folder that sits on my desktop. Whenever I download a font, it gets unzipped into that folder, and from that folder I install it into Windows10. I also have a backup of that folder on my external hard drive, which I update every three months.

I also store all of my maps there too. All of my fcws from cc3+, and all of my finished maps. Now I started doing that because I noticed I was taking up a lot of storage space, and since I'm working on a laptop, I have to be careful with that. Since then, I've also started storing all the profantasy .exe files, and all of my add ons, as well as documents, my campaign stuff, basically anything I don't want to lose.

My laptop only has the things that make it work. The programs themselves are installed on my laptop, but anything extra goes on the external. That serves two purposes. First, it keeps my laptop from getting bogged down searching through data to find things, and second, if I ever have to do a system wipe, I don't lose anything. Plus, it helps keep me organized...somewhat.

[jshoer]

This looks great!