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I am an imbecile; 1st off. Now to my question. I cannot figure out how to save Ninjatrader workspaces/templates, et al. to an external hard drive and have tried in vain to save it to an external memory stick (to no avail).
What about the cloud--will this save my Ninja in case my hard drive takes a shit? Just wondering. Please help out an imbecile today--karma, ya know?
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
I just upgraded my operating system to Windows 8.1 two days ago. I tried saving my ninja backup folder to a cloud in Webroot's cloud. I saved lost of other stuff from my desktop, mp3's, other folders, etc.. successfully but when I tried to recover the ninja backup files the folder was empty. I had to re build my charts/templates from scratch. I should have saved it to disk. I would suggest that.
Why haven't you had any luck copying the items you want to save to an external HD or Memory stick?
I use a memory stick. Once a week. Plug it in. Drag & drop all folders (below) I want to save....just in case
Workspaces
Templates
Indicator
Market Analyzer
Strategy
Type
Overwrite the stick once a week. I suppose I could also copy my NinjaTrader backup, but so far, haven't needed to do so. I figure with all these folders backed up to the stick, in the event I need to download & reinstall NT, I've got all my important stuff on the stick.
This has saved me a couple of times, when something got corrupted (like workspaces) or I screwed up my indicator file (had a bad one in there somewhere, but couldn't find it. Turned out it was one of those .cs files someone had posted & I forgot I had dragged & dropped it into my indicator folder.) - I was able to plug in the stick, drag & drop what I needed back to my HD and voila! Up and running in no time.
It's a bit cumbersome and definitely not automated in any way, but for the 15 minutes or so it takes me to do this, I feel it's been well worth it.
After all, it's what you learn AFTER you know it all, that counts!
I am going to try and figure this out (below). Um--why no luck with external hard drive or stick? Karma & fate I suppose. MANY attempts. I need an IT guy, simple as.
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By default, most "cloud" backup apps only select pictures out of your "Documents" folder. Few of them default to everything. So you have to adjust settings and look carefully to know what exactly is being backed up.
Also backing up the NT directory is very, very painful for most cloud apps, due to the way NT stores the flat files for minute, tick and daily data. It comes in at hundreds of thousands of tiny files if you monitor a lot of instruments. This is a nightmare for a cloud app that does a delta bit check on each file before uploading it, because it introduces an enormous amount of latency/delay due to the number of files that have to be checked.
Therefore for advanced users it is better to run a batch file that archives your NT directory into a single archive, then backup the archive. But this too creates problems with cloud services, many cloud services are limited to 2GB per file, and few support more than 4GB per file.
The bottom line is a backup is no good unless it's "known good". In the industry people refer to "known good backup". In other words, test your backup completely so you know you can rely on it -- this includes discovering missing or incomplete data.
I do use a cloud service as discussed in the back backup thread:
You walk into your office, and your computer is dead. The system won't boot. The hard drives are completely worthless.
Forget about salvaging data off the HDD's -- they're gone. It's over. The drives have given up the …
But I use it only for things like documents and photos.
For everything else, I use Macrium Reflect and make an entire image of my system daily and back it up to a local network server. I highly recommend Macrium Reflect if you are doing a full backup to an external disk or network location. It supports bare metal restore, but be sure you remember to take the time to create the recovery disk (bootable ISO, stick it on a USB stick).
GREAT responses in this thread--thank you to all you brainac nerdy programming types (and just smart guys too). Just a lowly trader here without alot of attention span after the day is done.
I use Win 7 pro and just drag and drop my Ninja backup once a week to a usb stick and also just
run the standard Windows Backup to an external drive.
From the Start page, just use Computer to drag and drop stuff and Control Panel to find Backup Your Computer.
Don't forget to format your external drive correctly. Just Google search for different format types for
your specific size / type of drive.
Keep messing with it - you will figure it out.
@BigMike ... your method is pure NASA man... you are a tech animal