| Backup your VM! |
Wed, 07 September 2011 10:08  |
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 BeeKeeper |
 | Officer Cadet 1st Year |
Messages: 214
Registered: December 2007
Location: Devon, UK, GMT | |
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While AH is unwell it seems a timely moment to speak about my own Stars! related technical problems recently.
Like a few others I run Stars! on the Virtual XP machine which can be run on some versions of Windows 7.
I run a daily backup to an external hard drive every day and thought I was fairly secure against loss of data - until I found out the opposite!
After a power outage my PC was left a bit fragile with hard disks vanishing and then re-appearing (sometimes) when the PC was re-booted. After a bit of head scratching a possible solution was to reload the BIOS as the problem seemed to be related to SATA drivers. Like a good boy I updated to the latest BIOS version and all seemed fine with all hard disks showing - then I tried to start the virtual machine. It would not start and moaned about a major hardware change and a new processor. The new BIOS seemed to be the cause as it was a major upgrade to the old one with the ability to unlock the hidden cores on the AMD chip. I had not tried that but still the VM refused to start. I tried installing the old BIOS but the system would not let me, even when done in DOS with the setup program.
There seemed no option but to re-install the VM but to do this I had to uninstall the old one and that, it said, would mean the loss of all data.
I had previously thought the files I could see in XP mode were somewhere on my PC, just well hidden. This is not the case. All the files you can see on the XP C:\ drive are stored in a .vhd file - a virtual hard disk. There may be ways to access these but it was not obvious to me so I went ahead and re-installed the VM and it fired up first time. I re-installed Stars! and all now works.
The lesson for me is not to rely on the Windows 7 backup to keep your Stars! files safe. I have now set up a scheduled backup in the virtual XP mode to do a daily backup of my Stars! files onto one of the PC's hard drives. This is working well and the files are in a recognisable format and are now backed up in turn by the Windows 7 backup program.
Many thanks to Void, Altruist and ManicLurich for their kind help in showing me how to re-create my .h files, which for those who don't know (I didn't) are not held on AH, only on your PC, so if you lose them the only way to recover them is to effectively start the game again, reloading your .m file each time for every year of the game. Altruist has a vbs file which automates the process and this worked well for me, but it was still a few hours work to get it all sorted out.
There may have been a simpler way to recover my data, only later did I consider trying to copy the .vhd file across from the Windows backup. If it all falls over again I may try that, but with a daily backup of Stars! files I should now be safe.
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| Re: Backup your VM! |
Sun, 11 September 2011 06:00  |
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| goober wrote on Sat, 10 September 2011 12:40 |
Perhaps AH Client could do that too. Set it up to download all the players tun files. IIRC it automatically opens and saves the games when you do this.
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When hosting, I use AHClient for this. You have to open each player's file (and save a .x?) to keep the .h file current however which I generally don't bother with.
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| Re: Backup your VM! |
Sun, 11 September 2011 19:46 |
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| goober wrote on Sun, 11 September 2011 22:16 |
Just set up AHClient to check what it does.
It saves back ups of m, p anf f files (it has to open up the game to accomplish the latter 2) for each player but doesn't save after opening, so no x file is generated. That would be a nice addition to AHC for any hosts out there.
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Not quite...it uses the command-line switches to generate the p and f files - the turn isn't properly opened. I can't remember the exact behaviour with x files...I do remember modifying the x file behaviour and compiling it myself but I can't remember if those changes were "released". JCH might remember...or if anyone really wants to know I can have a poke and diff my source code.
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