Autobackup of Save Games

[daniu]

Hi all,
just wrote a small tool to backup all the autosaves that get automatically created and overwritten again; thought someone else may find it useful as well.

This was mainly meant for the MPC, which often runs into desynchs; in that case, the common workaround is to send your partner an older save game and hope it works from there. If it doesn't and you don't have an earlier save, bad luck.
With the automatic backups, you can try going back turn for turn.

There's also a functionality to backup the automatically saved battle replays... in case you forget to save and play another battle afterwards (happened to me often enough in MP).

I also threw in the SP campaign save games, in case you want to keep track of every single turn.


The way it works is that it checks every 60 seconds whether a new autosave has been created; if so, it copies it within the same folder to a game with the date and time included in it. If your turns or battles take less than a minute, it may miss a save!
There is a "go" button; if this gets pressed, the tool will start checking for autosaves; just keep it running in this state and start the game.
Select the save games the tool should check for (see screenshot).

Word of caution: the campaign save games are quite large, about 20 MB each. This means that the backups may take up to around 1 GB per hour played...
There is an option to save only a certain amount of savegame files to save disk space. If the limit is reached, the oldest file will be deleted once a new one is saved.
This only applies to files from the current session (i.e., after the last time you pressed "go"), others will not be touched.
Replays are not included in this, they are too small.
Leaving this at 0 means no limit.


EDIT:
I just got around to try the tool out myself under actual gameplay conditions in a Coop Campaign with 5 minutes turn limit.
We had a session of about 6 hours (there went my Saturday ) and the savegame folder went up to 2.25 GB worth of files.

EDIT2 :
Turns out it's really easy to add "open path" buttons, so I did.

EDIT 3:
Added support for ETW and NTW.
Caveats:
- both don't have a replay autosave function, so that is disabled in the tool.
- I never played an MPC in either, so I can only hope the filename is the same as for S2 (autosave.save_multiplayer).
If it isn't, this won't work, drop me a note what it is so I can correct it.

EDIT 4:
Uploaded version 1.1 with savegame limit.

[Ishan]

This is the second tool thread you posted in the TWS2 GD forum, please submit tools\tutorials\resources here in the mod workshop only. It just has to be related to TWS2, modding tool or not doesn't matters.
If you don't think it's a tool then you can tag it as a resource also.

[fy9090]

thanks for this tool.

[Primergy]

Could this adopted for Empire/Napoleon too? Would be quite usefull to avoid the Save Game Bug .

[daniu]

Could this adopted for Empire/Napoleon too? Would be quite usefull to avoid the Save Game Bug .

Yes, easily.
OP updated.

[daniu]

Uploaded new version with savegame limit.
It seems to work; I haven't tried it in-game yet

[Zerobot1]

Thanks a lot for this seemingly simple solution!

Wish I'd had it through the summer though instead of waiting for the "patch".

[igaryu66]

Thank you! I was looking for this tool, how to make autosaves copied to another folder?

[daniu]

how to make autosaves copied to another folder?

I thought about doing that, but that would have meant you would have to copy it back into the original for the game to be able to find them if needed, so I felt it wouldn't really have made a difference if I didn't implement a full-blown management system... not planning to do that though because I want to keep the tool as simple as possible.
You'll have to make do with the "Open" buttons and move them manually, sorry

[igaryu66]

thanks !