5 ms·

I lost my kid's minecraft world because it stored everything under AppData/Local or some nonsense.

by kibibu 2y ago

mattl 2y ago
How did you lose it? That sounds super frustrating
- kibibu 2y ago
  By backing up everything in important-looking folders (including My Documents, My Games, the Minecraft installation folder), and overlooking AppData as it is 99% download caches, tempfiles, and other garbage.
  - hobs 2y ago
    :) and local state, configuration, and anything an app needs when you do stuff. It's really the local user state in most cases, very important to back up!
    - wink 2y ago
      On my Win10 desktop it got to 30GB though and the stuff worth backup is actually about 1GB of it. Let's just call it what it is: a complete mess. Some apps install their binaries in there, some just config files, some all your data. If there are guidelines (and they are not conflicting) about 1/3 of apps are ignoring them. Also good luck trying to back it up with robocopy or anything, maybe windows' own backup tool can read it while running on that account, I usually get errors, which I think are mostly fine to ignore.
      - hobs 2y ago
        There's no good guideline - if you want a local cache that transports across user migration, that's the show. Windows doesn't really have a "separate your local disk cache from your backups" method, but you can certainly do the Cleanup Task to remove some things that buy into that modal that's 25 years old :)
  - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
    I made a similar mistake when upgrading my SSD. There was some token that was stored in there that I needed, and IIRC I had lost the password needed to generate a new token. I only realized that I was even missing it a few weeks later when I needed to use the tool again. luckily I still had the old SSD so nothing happened. This happened even though I'm familiar with locallappdata and have even used it in some apps I created. It's just not the first thing you would think about when doing a backup unless you've already been bit by it before. Apps generally don't tell you if they store something important there, and the tool I was using never tell me where the token was stored. Doesn't help that file explorer hides the folder from you by default.

I lost my kid's minecraft world because it stored everything under AppData/Local or some nonsense.

by kibibu 2y ago

I lost my kid's minecraft world because it stored everything under AppData/Local or some nonsense.

mattl 2y ago

How did you lose it? That sounds super frustrating

kibibu 2y ago
By backing up everything in important-looking folders (including My Documents, My Games, the Minecraft installation folder), and overlooking AppData as it is 99% download caches, tempfiles, and other garbage.
- hobs 2y ago
  :) and local state, configuration, and anything an app needs when you do stuff. It's really the local user state in most cases, very important to back up!
  - wink 2y ago
    On my Win10 desktop it got to 30GB though and the stuff worth backup is actually about 1GB of it. Let's just call it what it is: a complete mess. Some apps install their binaries in there, some just config files, some all your data. If there are guidelines (and they are not conflicting) about 1/3 of apps are ignoring them. Also good luck trying to back it up with robocopy or anything, maybe windows' own backup tool can read it while running on that account, I usually get errors, which I think are mostly fine to ignore.
    - hobs 2y ago
      There's no good guideline - if you want a local cache that transports across user migration, that's the show. Windows doesn't really have a "separate your local disk cache from your backups" method, but you can certainly do the Cleanup Task to remove some things that buy into that modal that's 25 years old :)
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  I made a similar mistake when upgrading my SSD. There was some token that was stored in there that I needed, and IIRC I had lost the password needed to generate a new token. I only realized that I was even missing it a few weeks later when I needed to use the tool again. luckily I still had the old SSD so nothing happened. This happened even though I'm familiar with locallappdata and have even used it in some apps I created. It's just not the first thing you would think about when doing a backup unless you've already been bit by it before. Apps generally don't tell you if they store something important there, and the tool I was using never tell me where the token was stored. Doesn't help that file explorer hides the folder from you by default.