How To Backup Oblivion To Prevent An Uninstall

[worm82075]

I would like this info to be placed in the tutorials as I believe it is a must have for mod users and creators alike. But it needs to be sound, so lets run it through the ringer.

If anyone can add anything to this, correct any data I may have listed here or just test and confirm that it's sound I would be grateful.

 

 

Here is a tip that has saved me many a time. Get an external hard drive and after you make a full and complete install including all official mods and all utilities such as the CS, OBMM, OBSE and any other program that nests in the Oblivion folder make a full copy of the "Oblivion" folder on your USB drive. Also periodically and before you install anything questionable backup your "My Documents\\My Games\\Oblivion" folder(make sure you don't merge this folder with your backup of the main Oblivion folder). The next time you need to reinstall Oblivion just copy your backups overwriting over all files and anything else you added after the back up will remain. Most of the time you can get away with just coping over; (#'s correspond to the order in which I weed out the coruption)

4 Oblivion.exe

2 Oblivion.esm

3 Oblivion.bsa(all of them)

5 DLCShiveringIsles.esp

5 DLCShiveringIsles.bsa(all of them)

6 TesContructionSet.exe(not necessary unless CS fails to load)

1 And finally the entire Oblivion folder from "My Games"(just replacing this folder is often all you need to do)

 

I have just about every file on the nexus(unpacked) as well as a full backup of Morrowind and Oblivion and the Oblivion BSAs unpacked.

This looks like:

Location F:\

Size 49.5 GB (53,166,081,172 bytes)

Size on Disk 37.4 GB (40,197,131,167 bytes)(formated with NTFS most drives can store compressed)

Contains 237,308 Files, 23,775 Folders

Date Created Sunday, ‎September ‎16, ‎2007, ‏‎3:38:13 PM

 

Since that date I have not had to reinstall Oblivion from scratch and I've broken the game six times and four of those were solved with #1. One time with #2 and the last time all the way to #6 and no go so I had to do a total recopy. It was probably a DLL that time but who knows at least it worked and I swear by it.

 

Learn It, Love It, Live It

And good luck to you.