System Restore Can Result In Missing Aircraft

On the occasions when I use Windows System Restore, I usually pick a Restore Point that is only a few days old. Recently, however, I did a system restore where I needed to pick a restore point that was a couple of weeks old. I was a bit surprised at some of the results.

Some of my Traffic X flights went missing. (I use a lot of freeware user aircraft for my Traffic X AI traffic). Additionally, some of my recently installed liveries and recently installed aircraft models no longer appeared on the FSX "SELECT AIRCRAFT" screen. The installation of the missing aircraft and missing liveries postdated the date of the Windows restore point.

My FSX Airplanes folder showed subfolders for each of the missing aircraft. All of the subfolders for each of the missing aircraft and aircraft liveries were also still present. There were no missing thumbnails in any of the missing aircraft's texture folders. I could, therefore, rule out missing thumbnails as the reason for the aircraft not appearing on the FSX "SELECT AIRCRAFT" screen.

What I found is that Windows System Restore considers cfg files to be system files. While System Restore leaves user documents untouched, it doesn't do the same with system files. When I ran System Restore, aircraft.cfg files in the folders of aircraft that I had installed prior to the date of the restore point reverted to a version having a date that predated the date of the restore point. This was fine as long as I had not added any liveries that postdated the date of the restore point. For aircraft liveries whose installation postdated the restore point date, however, the aircraft.cfg files contained no information about the new liveries. I also found that if the texture folder for an individual livery had contained a texture.cfg file, the file was now absent if the date the livery had been added postdated the date of the restore point, since there had been no earlier texture.cfg version to which Windows could revert during System Restore.

New models whose install date postdated the date of the restore point lacked model.cfg, panel.cfg, and texture.cfg files. (Interestingly, .air files apparently were not considered system files, since they had not disappeared).

I found I had a lot of manual restoring of FSX files to do after running System Restore.

I wondering, though, what similar experiences others have had, and what things I may be overlooking?

Dan

Thanks for your comments, freddy. My experience certainly underscored the importance of backups and the importance of keeping backups current. Since I had not been keeping backups of aircraft.cfg files, et cetera, current, I had to rely on unzipping my backups of aircraft model and aircraft livery downloads to access originals of the aircraft.cfg, model.cfg, texture.cfg files, et cetera that had been lost during System Restore. Making a backup of an aircraft.cfg after each addition of a new livery or liveries would have eliminated the need to copy contents from readme file backups and paste them into aircraft.cfg files that had lost information about recently added liveries during System Restore.

Dan

Great idea.  Thanks for sharing. 

Hi, Mark,

I know this topic was started long ago, but your above batch file is such a bright solution for backing up all cfg files in FSX to a drive unaffected by System Restore that I thought I'd bring the topic up front, again, since there may be forum newcomers who didn't see your batch file when you originally posted it.

In my case, I run the file manually rather than via the Task Scheduler, and since I have FSX installed under Program Files (x86), I run the file with full Administrator control.

Dan