Since I have to do this quite a bit with my testing work, I thought I'd write a little post to show a quick way to restore your Falcon installation to a clean install.
You may be thinking, "why not just copy from a backup folder?" Well, Falcon's footprint on disk is pretty huge, and restoring from a backup folder takes a long time, since every single file from the 52,000+ files that comprise a complete Falcon installation, needs to be copied from the backup folder. That takes a long time on my machine. Longer than I want to wait, even if I was just doing it once in a while, but it's especially annoying to have to do that countless times in a single day when testing new stuff.
Since I'm an impatient kind of guy when it comes to waiting on that little blue progress bar, I use a folder synchronization tool to make the job quite a bit faster. Instead of copying every single file from the backup folder to the target folder, a folder synchronization tool will scan both folders and see what's different, and then only those files that are different or missing will be copied over (and any extra files in the target that don't appear in the source folder will be deleted). What you wind up with in the end is a perfect restoration of the backup folder, but in a fraction of the time.
So let's take a look at how to do this, using a free tool called
SyncToy to do the job.
Step 1.
Download and install
SyncToy from
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx.
Step 2.
Launch SyncToy from your
Start menu.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 3.
Click the
Create New Folder Pair button.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 4.
Click the
Browse button to browse for your Falcon backup folder.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 5.
Browse to and select your Falcon backup folder that you want to restore. Here, you can see I have several backup folders. I'll restore OpenFalcon for this example.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 6.
Click the
Next button.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 7.
Click the
Browse button to browse for the folder you want to restore to (for demonstration purposes, I'll just restore to the standard Falcon folder, "C:\Microprose\Falcon4", but if you're using a Launcher to select between multiple Falcon installations, your target folder will obviously be different here...)
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 8.
Browse to and select the folder you want to restore to, and press the
Ok.
Step 9.
Click the
Next button.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
step 10.
Select
Echo, then click the
Next button.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 11.
Assign a name to this job. From here out, you can just select this job from a list, without having to redefine it every time.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 12.
We need to change some of the default options. So, click the
Change options link.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 13.
Set your options per this screenshot, then click the
Ok button.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 14.
To see a preview of what will happen when you run this job, click the
Preview button.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Here, you can see SyncToy analyzing the two folders to see what's different between them.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
When it's done checking, SyncToy will show you what's different between the two folders. For this example, I didn't actually have any differences to show you, so you can see that if I were to run this job, SyncToy would manage to avoid copying almost 5GB of files. That's a time saver right there! You can click the
Run button if you actually want to run this job now.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
Step 15.
The next time you launch SyncToy, you'll notice along the left-hand side, there's a list of jobs you can run. Just select the job to run, and click the Run button any time you want to restore Falcon to its defaults.
Restoring to a clean Falcon install, the easy way
You can set up as many of these jobs as you want, so you could restore any of your installed Falcon versions to their defaults by keeping a backup folder for each installation.
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