Take backups of your save folder, or else...

[predzz]

If you're lazy to read a whole text or in a hurry, this is what it's about: I lost all my landmarks, and this situation could have been avoided by a simple warning from devs/CSR team, or better programming.

Last saturday, 7 days ago:
I was playing Ryzom, and suddenly lose my connection, which was also unstable for about 10 minutes after. I shut down the game and try to log in again (wish there was a reconnect button) ... all works fine except i lose my connection again while the game is loading after the character selection screen, forcing me to shut down the application with ctrl-alt-del. I decide to take a break and later that day give it another shot when my connection is more stable...

After logging in i notice something strange: my user interface (UI) ingame is back to default, as if i just made a new character and entered beginners island. Ok no big problem, just takes a few minutes to put them all back as they were. However, i later noticed ALL my landmarks were gone.

Some people won't mind this but i had hundreds of them. Mission mats (+excellent), NPC's, boss locations, tribes (both NPC's and unfriendly ones)... put there from when i started playing in September. Yes i know there are sites which provide these information too, but there were also some locations the sites didn't have but more importantly: i wasn't dependent on others' work for information and it's so much easier to just open up the map than alt-tabbing and surfing the web everytime i need to know something.

I consider landmarks to be part of my character, just like skill levels, items, looks, fame, among other things.

This could have been solved, or greatly reduced my loss in 4 ways:

-Not logging in unless you have a 100% stable connection (which would be like never)

-The best would be to have this information stored on the server, like everything else, with possibly just having copies on your hard drive.

-Another would be, ofcourse, to make it impossible for these kind of things to get lost in the first place (without having us to take backups).

-The perhaps easiest way would be to take backups... if i had known it was possible to lose this information and necessary to make these, i would have taken those weekly or monthly, which would have made my loss only a few % instead of 100%.

I wrote a ticket right after noticing the incident, and the GM told me:
-My files in my /save folder in the ryzom directory were corrupt probably because of having to shut down Ryzom while in a frozen loading screen. So when logging back in, Ryzom deleted the corrupted files and made new, default ones.
-It was a known incident and has happened in the past.

I must say, i am VERY dissapointed in the CSR team for at least not warning us. I can live with the fact the devs didn't store landmarks on the server, and this information can be lost if the files get corrupt, but if the CSR or devs had warned us about this, it wouldn't have happened in the first place. The GM i spoke to suggested to do this (to the other GMs or whoever -- not me). However, 7 days later still nothing happened. Is it that hard to put out an announcement on the forums or a sticky topic on the general forums or the news section on the site?

I am now writing this (read: doing their job) and warning others to take regular backups of your save folder if you don't want to lose anything...

[rschaub]

umm ok, there could be a warning somewhere, that's true.

but didn't you know that killing ANY app while it's running can result in data loss? it's just something you'll have to live with when you do that since you can never be sure if the app is writing something when you kill it.

(as and advice to all: especially if you've worked long till you got your perfect UI set up, make a backup of the files! also back up your cfg file if you've fiddled around with the settings to get ryzom running at a balanced quality/performance level)

[amitst]

lol go zella! call him an idiot good job

[vinnyq]

Good god! Sorry to hear that predzz. I agree with your statement about your markers being part of your char. You spend time to get search for those locations and mark them.

Ty for the warning!

*runs of to back up save folder*

[tygerqt]

Yes, it is true this can happen when an app is killed...

howevah...

I have a good friend that just had this happen to him as well.
Sept one difference - he didn't kill the app.
The app crashed on it's own
So death to it at all obviously can cause it (as most of us are aware).

My suggestion - put it on a disk.
Save, save, save.
This way - you're covered if the game crashes, you're covered if for some reason the laws of nature have decided to directly strike your hard drive with some serge of supernatural force..or a semi truck decides to come barreling through your living room and flattens your machine like a pancake (that I have actually seen...don't live on a dead end street people!).

Back to Atys I go!
*hugs*