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Backing up Railmaster


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Just a word of warning...

The hard disk failed in my 10 year old HP laptop a couple of days ago, so I've bought a new bottom-of-the-range HP Windows 11 laptop (£259.99 from Amazon, amazing value, much less than the old one cost 10 years ago) and successfully restored all my documents, spreadsheets, photos etc from Google Drive, which I had set up to do automated backups of any file that changed. However, when I installed Railmaster some years ago I overlooked the fact that it keeps its data in a program folder, not under the main Windows Documents folder hierarchy, so my Google Drive wasn't backing it up. My fault entirely!

So now I've downloaded Railmaster to the new computer in evaluation mode and got it talking to my elink successfully - this worked first time, after some grumbling from Windows Defender about viruses in the software, and I've rebuilt my track layout - luckily I found a saved screenshot of this, so it didn't take long to redo. I just now need to set up the locos in Resource.mdb again - I have an old saved copy of this with some of my locos, plus an up to date Excel spreadsheet of the Resource.mdb contents, so this shouldn't take too long. I found the Railmaster CD with the activation key, still sitting in the Majestic train set box, so I've submitted the details to Railmaster support and hopefully they will soon deactivate the key from the dead computer so that I can activate on the new one.

We live and learn!

Regards, John

Edited by Britannia Builder
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All back up and running now. Railmaster support had deactivated the key from the dead computer immediately, but their confirmation email went to my junk mail so I didn't see it immediately. Now successfully activated on the new computer, and the track plan and all 8 locos are working again. The trickiest part of the track plan was to work out by trial and error which port numbers I'd assigned to the points - luckily I remembered that I had used the range from 50 upwards.

I've decided to back up the important RM files in future by attaching them in an email to myself. I've saved the following files:

activate.dat

railmaster.ini

[trackplan].pln

resource.mdb

I don't have any RM program files to save.

Regards, John

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