Release BGS, The Backup Saved Games Tool, is out!


ekianjo

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I was talking about this in August and time has passed faster than I had thought. Anyway, here it is, fully functional (and hopefully bug free... we'll see about that).

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=bgs

Here's the sales pitch !

"Ever wondered what would happen to the saved game file of your favorite PS1 RPG (53 hours in and counting...) if your SD Card gets corrupted once day ?

Don't wait for that to occur and wonder what you should have done."

BGS is a small application which will check the presence of saved games for a number of set emulators and native games, and save them all together for you, automatically, in a single-file archive on your SD Card.
It will also duplicate that file on your second SD Card (if inserted) in order to maximize data redundancy and avoid that you lose everything if one of your SD Card dies. It's rather unlikely that your second SD Card would get corrupted at the exact same time.

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It currently supports backup up saved games for the following applications:

- Gambatte, Gameboy emulator
- Pcsx_rearmed, PS1 emulator
- Drastic, DS emulator
- PPSSPP, PSP emulator
- gpSP, GBA emulator
- UAE4ALL, Amiga emulator
- Snes9x4p, SNES emulator
- Gpfce, NES emulator
- Gngeo, NEO GEO emulator
- Fba, arcade emulator
- Apkenv, Android games (not emulated)
- Darkplaces, Quake engine
- Dune dynasty, Dune2 Reboot
- Scumm VM, LucasArts (and others) adventure games emulator
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein
- PicoDrive, Genesis/Megadrive emulator
- Freespace2
- Exult, engine for Ultima7
- Chocolate Doom, Doom engine
- Solarus DX, Zelda-like game
- Pewpew2, polygonal shooter
- Duke Nukem 3d, come get some
- 8Blitter, Master System/GameGear emulator
- Pushover
- Projectx, Forsaken-like game

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Once the backup is done...

03.png


... the program then makes a duplicate of the file on the second SD Card.

Note that in my case the archive is pretty big as you can see since I have tons of games in progress on PS1 with many save states for each, and that makes up for several megabytes each ! Same for Drastic...

For this kind of "big backup" the process took about 3 minutes on my 1Ghz. But if you have much less saved games to backup, it could take only a few seconds. Don't take my example as a benchmark!

I need your feedback in case you want other applications to be supported. Let me know !

And if something does not work for you... please shout!
 
Nice!

If you want to add Microbes and NubNub, it's easiest to just add anything in their appdata dirs to the backup. I guess that is true for most native games.
 
OK, so forgive me for a stupid question, but is there an easy way to then restore all your backed games from that file?  Or do you have to plug into a computer, unzip the file, and manually put them all back?
 
Depends what you call easy but you just need to extract the archive in the root folder of your pandora and thats it. One step. If you using new sd cards another step would be needed.


I could easily write a restore tool.
 
A restore tool would be especially helpful for a partial restore. For emulators it would be great to be capable of restoring only a single game's saves/states :)
 
For emulators it would be great to be capable of restoring only a single game's saves/states
That's asking for complex functionality :p I'm not saying it's not possible but it's clearly a lot more work to do this via the program while it would be very easy to do it manually :)  
 
This is exactly what I need as all my other programs are easily replaceable but of course saves change all the time and the fact that it also saves to the other card, fantastic.

Thanks for this very simple but handy app.
 
Is there support for sharing savegames or having complete ones available? Some games ive played years and years ago i dont have the saves to, and it would be nice to start playing where i left off.

Dare i say it, how about the cloud.
 
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Is there support for sharing savegames or having complete ones available? Some games ive played years and years ago i dont have the saves to, and it would be nice to start playing where i left off.
Not at this stage, but it could be possible. That's a bit out of the scope of a tool to "backup saved games" since this is the primary intent :)

Dare i say it, how about the cloud.
This is in scope :) I'm currently thinking what would be the best way to do that.  
 
Super duper app btw, you are very much allowed on the wiki with that. Great idea.

BGS → The Backup Saved Games Tool

backup gamesaves?

"Savegame checkpoint" is the best i could come up with
 
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Spout and CromoZome and PandoraPanic! should be easy to backup -> i.e. appdata folder.

Thruster, Beat2X would be trickier since they have files they copy to the appdata. (default songpack for beat2x)
 
The idea of this kind of app is very very good. I'd might make a full blown app for backup stuff [from any source (SD/NAND)] and any loc [for example backup emails from sylpheed email client]
 
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