Backing up

## Backing up Mudlet

As we learnt earlier, all your Mudlet saved files including settings, logs and profile settings, are located in a '.config\Mudlet" directory within your user folder (for Windows, atleast) such as "C:\Users\Shakralay\.config\mudlet\" with the specific profile settings inside "profiles\Avalon\_RPG", assuming your Avalon connection/profile is named "Avalon\_RPG".

### Setting files

The setting files such as "30-06-2017#11-50-27.xml" inside the "current" folder of your profile folder, will be many if you follow the advice here and click "Save Profile" often. Consequently many of these files will be very similar and it is a good idea to remove excess within a timeframe, leaving a few old ones and some of the new ones. This means that if you find out you deleted settings by accident, you can go back and load the old files to retrieve them (when connecting to a profile, there is a drop-down box to select what version of settings you want to load).

If you do this, pairing down the old xml setting files so you only keep a handful of older ones and a few recent ones, it becomes quite manageable to backup those files, either manually or by using onedrive, or my personal favourite mega, to automatically backup the folder as changes are made.

### Log files

If you log often, or like me all the time, then it is likely your log folder will bloat with many and/or large(100MB) files. Since its just text and this can be compressed rather well, and you should really keep your logs, I suggest zipping up large amounts of them, as the resulting zip will be much smaller. I zip up 1GB of HTML logs and the resulting zip is usually about 20-30 MB!

### The entire Mudlet profile

Every now and then I think its worth (after doing the previous steps to reduce size), to zip up/back up the entire profile folder in case something bad happens. While not totally necessary if you have your setting files backed up, it does enable you to keep a complete snapshot of the profile information, so that if you re-install Mudlet, your connection and settings are already there.

## What to do with Mudlet backups and backing up in general

Mega is a great free cloud storage service, and has a rather good and lightweight desktop app that can be used to automatically backup files and folder, with exclusions and other settings if you want to get specific. Using a tool with a automatic backup you can combine a regular automatic backup of your settings files, with a period backup of logs and Mudlet snapshots to ensure you don't have to go through losing settings again. It's also good practice, and hopefully encourages you to adopt backups for other things, if you don't already!

## An example backup strategy

If using an automatic backup for settings files, its a good idea to keep it paused until you wish it to be backed up (with mega, you can pause all uploads and/or downloads while you don't want the network traffic) since you might be created many of the setting xml files and they can get quite large if you install a lot of scripts. Also, its a good idea to remove old setting xml files periodically to keep the folder small, which is fine as long as you are doing periodic backups of the entire Mudlet profile. This keeps down clutter and file size while making sure you always have old files in case the need arises.

In the case of Log files, zip them up once you reach a certain point (1GB or whatever you feel is right, the zip will be massively smaller), and upload the ZIP to a cloud backup service.

Every now and then, after removing and backing up excess settings and log files, zip up the entire profile folder and upload it same as the log zips.