preserving a backup? what's best way to preserve the launchbox install?

[MazJohn [Mr Arcade]]

After spending countless weeks and months getting all my Launchbox systems working perfectly with all metadata and images included, I wanted to ask an important question here that I haven't seen discussed much. I am wondering what is the best way to preserve all of my work.. What is the best method to use to do a compete backup of my launchbox imstallation in order to restore to current state in the event of dreaded hard drive failure? The games and ROMs can always be copied back, so primarily I am mainly concerned on how to preserve all of the configuration settings for easy restore.... Is there a global way to accomplish? What method do you guys reccomend works best? Thanks,

[Jason Carr]

Hi @mazjohn, if you can back up the entire LaunchBox folder, that's the best solution. Assuming you haven't customized your folders to move images and other media items elsewhere, that's the best approach. The LaunchBox configuration consists of the LaunchBox.xml file in the root of the LaunchBox folder as well as all the images and media, basically. A better approach, though, typically is to sync your entire folder with Dropbox (or a similar tool like OneDrive or Google Drive). This way it's always backed up and syncs between all your machines. :)

[avalanche4000]

If you did have the full folder on drop box and your hardrive died, how hard is it to re-set up everything on a new machine? Is just dragging the folder off drop box back onto your desktop and everything works fine? or is there more to it?

[Jason Carr]

Dropbox runs in the background and automatically syncs everything to the cloud. So all you'd have to do is install Dropbox on the computer and everything would sync back to your new drive.

[SentaiBrad]

LaunchBox is completely portable assuming you haven't changed the paths for your images to outside of the LB folder. We use relative pathing. So if this breaks then you need to do a bit of extra set up. All you need to do is copy and paste the LB folder, or back it up in the cloud, and if something happens make a new copy of your backup. As long as your games stay on the same drive and the same path too, everything should still work. If your games and emulators change drives for example, you'd need to open up the LaunchBox.xml with Notepad++ and use the Fine and Replace function for the drive letter.

[MazJohn [Mr Arcade]]

Thanks Jason, Brad and all for feedback. This is great info.