What to back up

[daglob]

I know this has probably been answered before, but would somebody PM me with a list of those files that need to be backed up in FF1 and FFv3R before re-installing them? This time I'll save it.

[stumpy]

What you'll want to back up depends a lot on what you have installed as add-ons and what you are hoping to copy over or how you planning to get it back. For instance, if you have installed voice packs, you might just re-install them using their installers, for those that have them. But, not all VPs have installers and I don't recall that they do everything, like modify and recompile the string files so that the voices have nice names in the character builder screen. To do it manually, you would have to back up half a dozen or more files and folders (Data\Sounds\Speech\English or Custom\Sounds\Speech\English, sounds.dat, characters.dat, templates.dat, the *\Lang\English folder for each mod like ffx3 and data, and so on). Keeping your custom (and "custom" built-in) characters can be involved, too, especially if you don't want to redo FFX customizations and so on.

My advice is to make a copy of your whole base game folder and keep it safe somewhere so you can copy stuff back from it after the re-installation. That's the best bet to make sure you don't lose something, if you decide you need it later. The whole folder isn't huge by today's standards. And, if space is tight, you don't need the big .ff files in the Data folder, since the same ones will come from a fresh install.

If you are moving to a new PC and want your FF setup to have everything your old one did, I am pretty sure that simply copying your backed-up old game folder over the new one will work. I am pretty sure that's what I did.

[daglob]

What an elegant solution!

Thank you.