Backing Up FSX-SE Through Steam Site?

I just realized that it is possible to make a backup of FSX-SE through the Steam site. Does anyone know if this backup includes the addon scenery that has been added to the simulator or is it just the basic FSX program?

Seems like it would be silly not to include the addon scenery. What would be the point of doing a backup when you could just re-download the program and re-load the scenery yourself?

Any information you could provide would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Steve in Kansas

I'm willing to bet (but not too much) that the backup is just the game and your current configuration set. Nothing more. Two reasons why I say this:

1) My use of Steam (not for the Sim) seems to indicate backups for installed games and nothing more.

2) I highly doubt they (Steam) would allow a mass of data to be uploaded to their severs. Lets face it, my install is around 55 GB. I've read others having an install two to three times that size!

I backup my Sim on two Hitachi enterprise grade platter hard drives. One always being disconnected from the computer. I also archived the whole FSX folder using a 7Z archive (best compression I know of) and then burned that giant archive to a single 50 GB Blu-ray disk. That disk is placed in my $35 SentrySafe branded fireproof safe (NOT for physical access protection but for fire mitigation). I have three of these safes for my Social Security card, diplomas, car title and other important stuff right down to physical media backups of all sorts. I utilize the cloud and physical media. You can often times get these safes on eBay for around ~$35 and free shipping. No crime, I mean Prime required. And they make safes for electronics. Protip: Keep everything in plastic. Whether plastic sleeves for paper or sandwich bags. Because the contents in these safes can get moist during a fire. Use large static bags for EMF/solar flair protection if that even works...

Check out FreeFileSync, S3 Browser and GSplit 3. You can create batch files to fire off for S3 Browser in Windows Task Scheduler...

And BTW- Optical media is nice for bit integrity over flash and magnetic based storage. And they do make 100 GB sized Blu-ray disks. Just need the right burner. Mine is a Pioneer and the optical media is Sony. It'll also burn M-DISC. I have Wikipedia entire on a M-DISC using WikiTaxi. I've instructed family members to place that disk in my casket should I move on to the fourth dimension so to speak... :D It also has other things on the disk as there was room. I'm not worried about future decoding ability.

(You're actually not allowed to do that, but what's the harm FFS?)

Your other post on backups lead me to this: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/4593-5CB7-DC3C-64F0

In a nutshell: No. No as in add-ons and what not. Not even the awards and what have you.

As soon as you added sceneries and/or aircraft, you modified scenery.cfg or FSX.cfg you should do regularly backups of these files or folders. It's just for your own advantage.

Bernard

Are you talking about the Steam backup feature? If so, that creates local copies to avoid re-downloading the game again. However, I believe it will only backup whatever was installed by Steam, meaning that in the case of FSX, it isn't going to backup add-ons that you have installed or config files.

Backing up FSX and al installed add-ons gets tricky, especially if you have commercial add-ons. Many commercial add-ons use the registry to store registration and other info that make it harder to simply just copy the FSX folder. The easiest way to manage this is to use a disk imaging program to create an image, or images if you have multiple drives, of the entire system, including Windows and the registry.