Tuesday 30 September 2008

Backup Spore Save Games

Since Spore save games seems to be driving traffic to this blog, you may find the following code useful to help you back up your existing Spore save game in Windows.

Copy and paste the following code into a file sporebackup.bat:

mkdir "%userprofile%\Spore Backups"
xcopy /e /y /i /r /h "%appdata%\spore\games\*.*" "%userprofile%\Spore Backups"
Then, when you double-click on the sporebackup.bat file, this will automatically backup your spore files to a Spore Backups directory in your user directory (one up from either My Documents or Documents). You may find this useful to schedule in Task Scheduler on your machine.

If Windows had a decent scheduling engine, or for that matter, an easy way to script actions on files being updated, I'd write something to do this automatically whenever you save your game.

This technique is relatively common to another game genre, roguelikes. You may find checking out the rest of this blog helps you understand the genre a little better.

6 comments:

Tsojcanth said...

Windows has at installed by default, never had any problem with that.

Andrew Doull said...

I thought about at, but I'd prefer soon if possible.

VRBones said...

Although I've moved on to more Warhammerlike arrivals, I usually have batch files like this to test roguelikes, but with a rolling backup so that you have the 5 most recent backups:

-------8<----------
rmdir /q /s "%userprofile%\Spore Backups\5"
rename "%userprofile%\Spore Backups\4" 5
rename "%userprofile%\Spore Backups\3" 4
rename "%userprofile%\Spore Backups\2" 3
rename "%userprofile%\Spore Backups\current" 2
mkdir "%userprofile%\Spore Backups\current"
xcopy /e /y /i /r /h "%appdata%\spore\games\*.*" "%userprofile%\Spore Backups\current"
-----8<------------

Unknown said...

You should use .cmd instead of .bat ... mainly cause it sounds cooler to say Windows Command Script instead of Windows Batch Files... too retro... Also, on XP, .bat uses the 16-bit command processor (command.com) or at least it used to (maybe just Windows 2000...) Naaa... just cause it sounds cooler... Thanks for the Spore game info.

Patrick Kuijpers said...

mayba a bit weird to do this manually, but when you wanna format your computer is't very usefull ^^
Thanks for the help.
Only 1 question.
Where do I have to put these files to make them work

VRBones said...

Congratulations, you're now famous enough for WoW gold spams.