Tip Of The Day #039

Tip Of The Day #039

xLights has a number of backup features built in that can save you when it all goes bad … but you need to make sure you have it set up correctly. So here are a couple of settings to get familiar with.

On the Settings menu:

Backup on save … when this option is on xLights will backup your files whenever you do a save … effectively ensuring you can go back to any save no matter how many times you save.
Backup on launch … when this option is on xLights will backup your files when it starts … meaning no matter how an editing session goes you can always go back to the beginning of your current session. This option also means that after a crash any recovery actions you might take are always reversible. We would generally recommend this be turned on at a minimum.
Alternate backup location … use this option to set the backup location to use when you press F11 … use this option to point to say your dropbox or some offline storage for a less frequently used but maybe more independent backup.
Backup subfolders … this option is really really important if you store your sequences in subfolders of the show directory. When not set xLights will only backup files in the show directory itself. If you want files backed up in subfolder you must select this option.

Can I manually trigger a backup?

You can by pressing F10 or selecting one of the backup actions on the File menu.

So what actually gets backed up?

Basically *.xml and *.xbkp files … so files like your network settings, layout and any sequence files along with any autosaved versions of them. Any other files are ignored. There is a maximum file size that will be backed up of 30MB … if your sequences are larger than this they will be silently ignored … that is a pretty large sequence file so this should be very very rare.

And where do they get backed up to?

To the “Backup” folder in your show directory. Inside the backup folder each backup is stored in a separate timestamped folder … indefinitely. This means if you use xLights a lot this folder can be huge … and we never ever delete anything because we cant know which backups are important to you. Consequently we recommend from time to time that you go into this folder and do some housekeeping to delete some older backups you no longer need.