Computer and SimCity 4

[Sims21 2]

I was just wondering what if your computer had a virus, or it doesn't work properly any more and you spent a lot of work on your city with effort and time with all the NAM and other downloads?  I see a lot of regions and cities on what people built, but what if your computer doesn't work properly any more, would you have to start all over? 

[Cyclone Boom 17,032]

Well, it depends if you've made a backup. You never know what may happen to your computer. That's why it's always good practice to make regular backups of your personal documents and files.

 

The same applies to SimCity 4 content. It's quite easy to back up the entire contents of your "Documents\SimCity 4" folder, including all plugins and regions. Should the worst happen, the files could be restored to a new computer or installation. Probably the easiest way is by copying to multiple USB drives. The capacity of these is increasing all the time and are very cheap nowadays. The only main downside is flash memory has limited cycles before it will fail completely. So an external hard drive or CD/DVD is more appropriate for long-term archival storage.

 

In an ideal situation, it's best to have at least three different backup mediums. That way if one fails, there's another to rely on.

[z1 566]

As long as the virus didn't corrupt your Plugins or cities, you should be fine, as they aren't executable files.  Just copy them over to your new computer.  The worst case is that they're corrupted, and they just won't work.

 

However, I would strongly second what Cyclone Boom said about backups, as otherwise, something's going to happen to those files sooner or later (user error, disk failure, etc.)

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

I have two external HDDs.  One is on-line and gets my automatic backups every week as soon at the clock says Thursday.  There is also a partition on this drive that I can use for manual backups, which I do when the spirit moves me, about once a month.

 

Then there is the drive that is normally powered down.  I bring it up about once a quarter and synchronize the manual backups I have taken with it, including the one I make when I start this process.

 

As an old computer sweat, I've had everything happen to me computing wise that can probably happen.  The first really bad thing was when the new Fastrand Drums we got for system occupancy at Expo '67 failed.  The heads fell on the drum surfaces as soon as the drives powered up.  The most recent incident occurred when I dropped my backup drive when rearranging my disk.  Cracked the board so all my backups on the primary were lost, but not the secondary.  An expensive lesson, cost me $200 to replace the drive.