Whew, I almost blew it!

[Prophet42 1,500]

I was working on my city of En Elohim in my region of Hebron and I almost ruined the city.  I made a rookie mistake (even though I've been playing SC4 deluxe since it came out, plus previously SC3000 and SC2000). 

 

En Elohim supplies my water to the region.  I was running out of water in my water deals between the other cities, so I decided to add another pumping station in En Elohim.  Well, I added the large pumping station (capacity 200,000), and bulldozed my smaller pumping stations and saved the city (oops).  This left me with very little cash and a 2000/month budget deficit.  I realized I was in trouble when I was offered Area 5.1 and the missle silo. With no way back to the starting point since I had saved the city I decided to put them both in my city.  Even still had about a 500/month budget deficit.  So I used the remaining cash to zone as much as I could to raise the population and the tax base (En Elohim still had a small population of around 1000).  Well this got my budget deficit to only about 300/month.  By this time I had negative funds.  With still losing money I started raising taxes.  I got them up to about 12% before my power deal with Portview got canceled and all the zones lost power.  Now I was in BIG trouble.  So I exited the city without saving and got my memory stick out where I backup my Simcity files.  I copied the saved version of En Elohim, overwriting the current file.  I started SC4 up again, opened En Elohom, and wa-la problem solved.  I was back to where I was at the beginning of the evening with En Elohim providing water to the region and with a budget surplus.  This time, I only added a small pumping station to statisfy my water needs and remained in the black.

 

Moral of the story - Back up your Simcity mydocuments folder at least twice a week like I do.  Even the most experienced players can make rookie mistakes.

[Mcnamara 1]

I'll keep this in mind. I've never backed up the files because I didn't know exactly what folder it was but thanks to this now I know. I've also been in the situation where I make bad decisions and end up with negative budget hehe but I've always managed to come back up with no cheats like yourself. What I do is raise taxes (a little), ask for loans (sometimes like 30-40 grand) and zone a lot. Then the population justifies the expenses.

 

I like the rush.

[michaeldcannaday 42]

I learned the hard way too, now I always save my cities & plugins to a seperate flash drive (just incase, you never know)   Also there is a cheat money tree that I have, which I can give the link if you need it, that gives you a surplus of a million dollars once you plant it, and you can bulldoze it when you're tired of money coming in... I never run out of money     Wish that was real life

[Cyclone Boom 16,851]

If in debt, a quick way to receive a cash boost is using the "moolah" command in the Extra Cheats DLL. This can set the treasury to any desired value -- either higher or lower.

Of course, it's no substitute to backups if cash can't resolve a problem like this. By the way, with USB sticks, I'd always recommend creating a local copy just to be safe. They can be quite fragile to damage and wear, and are not ideal for long-term storage.

[Prophet42 1,500]

 

By the way, with USB sticks, I'd always recommend creating a local copy just to be safe. They can be quite fragile to damage and wear, and are not ideal for long-term storage.

 

Thanks for the tip Cyclone Boom.  Actually I really just use the USB stick for file transfer.  I have SC4 installed on my laptop and desktop.  I swap files between the two using the stick to keep them in sync.  So I guess you could say my desktop is my 'long term' storage.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

And I have two free standing HDDs connected over USB ports.  One is 1 TB with five 200 GB partitions (automatic backups) and the other is 300 GB with three 100 GB partitions used for manual backups.  I have my FSTAB set up to pick up the 1 TB drive as part of the file system.

 

As I think about it, it is probably time for a health check on the 300 GB drive.

[GeometryMath Algebra 614]

Welp, I am too lazy to backup my files. My style is if I do a mistake and didn't do a major construction project, I exit to region without saving and go back with the last save point. Problem solved.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I save frequently giving me a restart point.  If things are really bad, I can back out to my weekly save.

[Prophet42 1,500]

Yeah, I too save frequently while playing the game.  Unfortunately I had saved at a point which was the cause of the issue so there was no way back to a point before the trouble.  That is why I had to resort to my backup.  I can't stress enough how important it is to backup your files on a media other than your computer.  This is just good practice for all your data.  For my computer backup I use a 1TB external drive.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

I guess I didn't mention that my weekly saves go directly to my external 1 TB drive.  All this talk about backups reminded me to do my semi-annual general backup to my other external HDD.  I try to have recovery in-depth.