What a difference a day makes.  Thursday evening, I was rocking along with my Battleground runs and getting ready to work with Gavin on some other character testing in the Beta when a nice little storm blew in.  One bad lightning strike later and I was dead in the water.  My hard drive was fried.  So there I sat trying to figure out some way to salvage not only the evening, but also nearly 6 months worth of work.

You see, I had made the mistake of not backing up all of the articles, ebooks and guides I had written.  Like a dummy I had succumbed to this strange notion windows has of putting everything in the My Documents folder.  I long ago got tired of fighting the ghost of Wild Bill Gates and just let it do whatever it wanted.  Big mistake.

Needless to say, when you are looking at the blue screen of death and know that somewhere on your hard drive is nearly 1,000 hours of work that would be virtually impossible to duplicate your pucker factor increases into the millions.  After fiddling with the recovery console for about 12 hours I was finally able to fix the master boot record of the hard drive and get back to ground zero, but I really thought I was looking at a couple thousand dollars in data recovery fees.  Just goes to show you what a little frantic Googling can do for you.

The whole ordeal taught me a few valuable lessons, and something about WoW that might come in handy for all of you at some point in time.  But let’s cover the just plain computer “don’t let this happen to you” stuff very quickly.  If you never felt the need to use a UPS (Uninterrupted Power Supply) and a decent backup program, get both right this second.  You can find backup utilities for free, or if you prefer something really slick you can always use Acronis.

Seriously, even if you don’t think you have anything you can’t afford to lose on your computer, you’re probably fooling yourself.  At the very minimum, get another hard drive and at least save your contact lists, music, and the other stuff you use all the time to the alternate drive at least once a month.  You don’t really even need a backup program, they just make it easier.

Anyway, on to the WoW issue.  I HAD saved WoW on one of my SATA drives, so at least I didn’t have to go through a bagillion hours of downloading the whole thing from scratch.  But since I didn’t have another computer that could run the SATA drive I only had one option left - my wife’s laptop.

No problem, i figured.  She uses all the same mods and a Fang gamepad just like I do, so I can just pop on and keep up the BG runs.  Well, not so much.  I had failed to remember that we had only set up HER account to mirror mine, but when I logged into MY accounts on her machine, it was just a mess.

Nothing was in the right place, the keybindings were nonexistent, all the bars and mods were in all the wrong places - it was basically impossible to play and do much of anything except run around.  Well, I’m not one of those honor mooches, so I didn’t saddle my team with a total loser that couldn’t contribute.  Since I was already nearly screaming over losing everything on my machine, I sure didn’t feel like spending an hour getting everything right from scratch on her machine just to run a few AV’s.

But there is an easy way to do just that.  I have a little USB drive so today I popped it in and copied a few things from MY WoW folder to it and in about two minutes I had everything set up on that laptop to run exactly the way it does on my machine.  It’s really simple if you know what to copy, and I’m about to show you what files to grab so that you can make WoW work on any machine that has WoW installed without ever missing a beat.

Here’s a screenshot from inside my WoW folder.  The two folders we will be working with are the Interface folder and the WTF folder.  Real simple with the Interface - if you want to copy all your addons to another computer just copy the entire folder.  We have to root around in the WTF just a bit.

Inside WTF you will find two things, a folder named Account, and a file named Config.  Open the Account File and you should see a folder for each one of your WoW accounts.  At this point all you have to do is copy each account file you want to put on the new machine.  Since that’s just almost too easy, let’s take it a step further.

If you ever run into a situation where something tragic happens (like it did to me) and you need to repair something one realm at a time you can also copy settings from one realm to another within each account.  Inside each account folder, you will see something like this:

On this account, I only have toons on the Fenris realm, but if I had toons on more than one realm, then you would also have a folder for each realm.  Certain settings are saved by realm, so if you’ve been playing for months on one realm and have everything just the way you like it, you can also transfer all of those settings to toons on a new realm without having to go through the process of doing it all manually in-game.  This is especially handy if you transfer a toon to another realm or account.

From the account folder, just copy the bindings-cache, Saved Variables folder and SavedVariables.LUA files if you need to put them on another account.  (There are two SavedVariables files shown here, but one is a BAK or backup file, WoW will automatically create a new one so there’s no need to copy that one)

When you open the realm folder, in this case Fenris, you will see a folder for every character on that realm (and even for toons you used to have that you may have deleted - just can delete those if you like to cut down on clutter).  To copy settings specific for one toon to another toon, just copy everything INSIDE one of those toon folders and paste it to the new toon folder on any account or realm.

So to recap here in case I lost anyone.  To move ALL of you settings to another machine, copy the Interface folder and paste it to the WoW folder on the new machine.  (If someone is using a different set of mods on the other machine that they want to keep, be sure to copy THEIR Interface folder first and put it somewhere they can find to replace your copy with theirs again later).  Then in the \World of Wacraft\WTF\Account folder, copy any account folders and paste those into the WTF folder on the new machine.

If you need to copy settings to another account folder on your own machine for whatever reason, the files to copy from the \WTF\Account\*ACCOUNT NAME*\*Realm Name* are:

1. Saved Variables Folder

2. SavedVariables.LUA

3. bindings-cache

4. Entire contents from inside \WTF\Account\*ACCOUNT NAME*\*Realm Name*\*Toon Name*

So to copy the settings for your Toon “Ubergoober” on the “Flobbit” realm on your account “Dominators” you would click the WTF folder, the Account folder, the Dominators folder and from there copy the first three files listed above.  Then you would click the Flobbit folder and finally click the Ubergoober folder and copy everything in that folder.  Once you have all the files, you would reverse that process to add those settings to another toon on any account or realm you like.

It would be pretty neat to have a little program to automate this process, but I doubt I can talk Gavin into writing the thing - it’s not like we don’t have enough to do already.  It’s not really complicated once you know what to copy from which folders, and you can always come back to this article as a referrence.

So in the end, my (near) loss made me take a close look at exactly how to move my settings, and now you know how to do it too.  Good luck, and may lightening NEVER Dominate YOUR hard drive!

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