Backing up your installation

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

But I have a good installation now, so here is what I did to save my bacon.

1. Open the registry editor
2. In HKCU.Software highlight the Electronic Arts key and use the export registry command to create a file containing this set of entries on to your desktop, then
3. In HKLM  do the same thing.  You should now have two *.reg files
4. Open windows explorer and open Program Files.  Compress the Maxis folder (I used .zip format) also to the desktop.
5. Move over to your Documents folder and compress the SimCity 4 folder as well.
6. You now have four new files on your desk top, two .reg and two .zip.
7. Create a new folder on your desktop named SC4.backup and move each of these files into it.
8. Now, depending on what kind of external storage you have, write this folder out and put it away.

If anything happens to your game, you can restore it as of the date you did your save.  If you like, you can periodically replace the file created in step 5.  In fact, if you are paranoid about it, you can run the whole thing again anytime.  You still need a valid play disk in the drive to play this after a restore.

Here is an image of my backup folder on my external disk drive.