Backing up your files

It's always a good idea to make backup copies of your hard disk, in case you ever have a hardware failure or software problem that requires replacing or reformatting your hard disk.

My first recommendation would be to use a good backup program or disk imaging program that saves everything on your system. I consider that to be the safest approach, because it guarantees that you won't accidentally forget something important.

But some people prefer to do manual backups, in which case you'll want to know which PinballY files you need to back up. Or, there might be times when you just want to create a snapshot of your full PinballY setup. So for those situations, here's a list of all of the files needed to re-create your PinballY setup:

The Media and Databases folder locations depend on your option settings. See Files & Folders for full details, but here's the quick summary:

PinballY doesn't store any settings in the registry, so you don't need to worry about that. (Many other programs do use registry settings to store user information, though, which is one of the reasons I think it's a good idea to use a proper backup program or disk imaging program, rather than making backups manually. A "real" backup program will usually include a full capture of the registry as an automatic part of the backup set.)

You don't need to back up the PinballY program files themselves, since you can always just do a fresh install to re-create those. But if you're not on a tight space budget for your backup media, the simplest thing is to just make a copy of your entire PinballY folder tree (plus your complete PinballX folder tree, if you're sharing media with PinballX).

Recommended backup practices

This has nothing to do with PinballY, but as long as we're on the subject, I can't resist the urge to make some recommendations about backup practices in general. I see too many posts on the forums from people who had to re-build their systems from scratch after a hard disk failure or Windows crash. It's clear that a lot of people skip backups for their pin cabs. Don't be one of them!

Here are some key things I'd look for in a backup setup: