Whats your experience transferring installs between systems?

[+daddyairplanes 8,689]

NOTE: this isnt so much looking for advice as just discussing how its gone for others in the past.

So, still working around real life on getting my new computer set up, and the final part is going to be setting up my SF2 installs. currently at a nice medium 90GB worth of goodies (i say medium, i know theres some going holy crap thats a lot and some saying thats rookie numbers )

last time i did this, i backed it all up and dropped it all in after creating matching installs.

this time is going slower, as i plan to make it much more painful in the beginning .

5 basic exes set up currently, with new ones to be created for naval combat, NATO 1950-1960, NATO 60-70, and 70 on up. a vietnam dedicated to helicopters, two test specific ones (one clean and one set up for nukes) and a jumbo jet specific one (because, me)

but wait theres more!

not only am i doing these up, but looking at things like Eastern Med specific to the improvements i've made ( the LARAF Herk skin in there is similar to mine, but mine is tweeked up a bit better as one example)

so a process that took about 45 minutes last time is going on 12 hours actual time spent over the last week.

whats your experiences installing SF2 into new systems? am i being extra special this time around or still being noobishly simple?

[+DoctorQuest 107]

I have had issues transferring the EXECUTABLES between systems but never the contents of the mods folders.

So I almost always do a clean install of the SF2 program folders and then copy the mods folders, update my options.ini files for the various mods and off I go. I always have a separate backup of all my mod folders. External drives are your friend.

[+EricJ 3,943]

Agreed, as after Vista I started using external hard drives. Though 90GB is pretty low as I have 101GB for my install though 

[bazillius 1,252]

The SF2  (both the game itself and mod folders) completely portable. i just do copy paste if i need and do correction at Options.ini

My Mods folder  more than 100 GB

[+Erik 1,731]

Most systems these days allow for multiple solid state drives. Getting a 1TB drive just for SF is the easiest way to store and move all that data. You should be able to store the program files on that drive as well so moving everything in the future would be a plug, install, play, 5 minutes tops routine. I would think this is the best performance as well since you're not moving data across a USB bus or getting bottle necked with Read Write buffering on traditional HDDs. I swear by SSDs especially now that the larger size formats are coming down in price. I think I gave just over $200 USD for an Intel 1.2TB enterprise server drive about a month ago on Amazon which could be used in a home system with sequential reads/writes over 550 MB/s. You can get consumer drives without the high throughput for about half that money or $100 USD.

 

[UllyB 1,204]

 I followed the Migbuster tutorial in KB and installed all 5 SF games. I never had trouble with that.And, of course I set a folder for saving everything important (aircraft, different settings, 3D objects etc)

[+daddyairplanes 8,689]

ther Eric(K)s are closest in reading my intent on the post

Erik: oh i know this. 4 drives total although the two regular HDDs  are mirrored (before coffee cant reemember RAID 0 or 1 just yet). and those are now renamed from "RAID" to  "Mod Drive". was going to set up the second SSD as the back up drive for the main system but me thinks i will affect a slight change up now

EricJ: I thought i was a little low . with this go around im going to try to remember its a flight sim, not a just a digital model painting program

 

all others : thank you for your replies so far. i had a brain fart when i said exes, meaning installs. i did in fact have fun with installing each bit i have from TW to date (from the site this time instead of my external) and am working on the mod folders copied from my old system before totally setting up the new one.

although i have a copy of Dels C-130A in the mod folder already even before its official

 

 

update: transferred from the hdd to the ssd. took 14 minutes to move all 90 GB. im impressed, esp since at best that used to be a start at lunch check at dinner operation

 

Edited May 21, 2021 by daddyairplanes

[+EricJ 3,943]

I hear you, but 90Gb isn't that bad really but so far I've been able to score 2TB HDD for 60 bucks, so it's not great but it's good enough.

[+daddyairplanes 8,689]

well, as a guy in a movie once said, its a small operation, but theres potential for aggresive expansion!

 still was impressed. pulling off of external into the system still took same amount around an hour or so on the same system. so 14 minutes was a lil impressive to me at least

now back to comparing stock ish aircraft, already in progess

 

 

[UllyB 1,204]

15 hours ago, daddyairplanes said:

well, as a guy in a movie once said, its a small operation, but theres potential for aggresive expansion!

LOL