I downloaded this game yesterday from the Adventure Shop - took forever to download, think I started around 11a.m. or a bit before and it was still going when I went to bed at 11p.m.!!! Luckily it was all there this morning.

I haven't even activated the game yet but wanted to put the whole thing on a DVD which they say you can do, well it sort of worked, all the files are on the DVD but they're all compressed so I've no idea if the thing will work or not and no idea how to decompress it. Don't even need to of course at the moment but after such a long download I really wanted a backup copy in case I've a computer problem, already lost one whole HDD that can't be fixed without paying around $1,000 Aus. and although there are things on there that both my husband and I want, we certainly don't need any of the files that desperately to pay that much for them.

I dunno, maybe I just didn't copy the files to the DVD properly, lost the original version of Nero that I used to use, the one I have now is different because it's a much newer version.

Anyway, any ideas would be really appreciated.

JoAj, this is better suited in Glitches rather than Discussions since it's tech related. I will move this to the Glitches forum.

Ana

Aren't they the same files you downloaded?
If you are able to install the game off of the DVD, then you'd know whether it was a good copy or not. You're not supposed to decompress the files yourself. The game's installer should do that for you.

Alternatively you could use an md5 file checking utility and if the files on the DVD have the same MD5 as the ones on your hard drive, then they copied correctly.


If you really want to rescue the data on a failed hard drive, try Spin-Rite first. It's $89 US, which is currently around $83 Australian -- quite a bit less than $1000.
http://www.grc.com/intro.htm


Maybe you're thinking of burning an iso file or some other type of image file to DVD. If you do that (and you do it right), you end up with the original files as they were before they were made into an iso. But AdventureShop is not giving you iso files. They only give you an exe file and one or more bin files.

Thanks for the reply.

Actually I think the problem is that I copied the files to the DVD as a backup and no doubt they can be restored with Nero's Restore Backup program. Probably not all that important at the moment except that I thought I'd like to have an actual DVD of the game in case I wanted to replay it and didn't want to keep the thing on my HDD or have to download it all over again. I always used to replay games over and over but these days it's something I rarely do.

Just copy the files that you download onto a DVD. The DVD wont be in the sort of bootable format that a bought DVD is but you will still be able to install the game again at a later date by either copying the files back onto you harddrive and installing from there or opening up the DVD in Windows and double-clicking the install file from there.

A game DVD wouldn't be bootable anyway. A game DVD doesn't have to be bootable the way a Windows DVD does.

Yes, what I meant was it wouldnt autorun the installer when the disk is inserted.

This thread really caught my attention, as I seem to be collecting more and more games. It's easy to delete games from my Big Fish game manager and download them again later. And games purchased and installed from a disc can be deleted and reinstalled at any time. But since a number of websites only allow a certain number of re-downloads of purchased for "download only" games, I hesitate to get into that same habit with my downloaded games.

Would the things mentioned above be the best way to save my downloaded games? Should I *not* download my games from my Program Files onto a DVD? Should I use the folder created when I first downloaded the game? I'm speaking of the folder with the .exe file and .bin files, config files, savegame files, or setup 1, 2, 3, etc. I still have those original files in "my downloads" folder. But if anything were to happen to my 3 or 4 year old XP rig, it would be nice to have these games ready to download onto a new computer, should that ever become necessary. (I don't have an external hard drive, and it's not in my budget at the present time.) If your response is, in fact, about the latter - the download files with the .exe files, would it be prudent to delete those original folders from my computer after copying them to a DVD, to free up space on my computer?

The worst problem with those games is not the downloading but the activation. You can always burn the downloaded files onto a disc. The worst part is that you are often allowed limited activations. You probably don't need to worry if you're installing on the same computer (same hard drive) as you played the game before because the activation information is not uninstalled along with the game. But if you install on a new computer you'll need to reactivate.

GOG and DotEMU are the exception and require no activation.



That seems to work for Big Fish games, but it isn't likely to work with larger adventure games because they have installs that modify the registry -- and registry changes are not copied when you download a game folder from C:\Program Files.



Yes -- save the files you downloaded.


You'd probably be better off zipping up saved games before burning them to disc. Burning files to CD or DVD makes them read-only -- so when you copy them back to the computer they can't be overwritten. That can cause problems if the game needs to modify them. Config files might be specific to the computer and you might not want to use the same config files on a new computer as you do on an old one.


That depends on how much free space you have on your hard drive. If you have a 500 GB hard drive with only 50 GB being used, you don't gain much by deleting them.

Thank you very kindly, Jenny100. There's more to consider than I had realized. I was not aware that activation specific to each computer was involved. I have quite a bit of room on my computer, 180GB used and 513GB left, so as you stated, it might be best to leave well enough alone. I do appreciate the time you took to answer my questions in such detail. Many thanks!