I Want to Keep My Character Data in WOW When Formatting
If you decide to upgrade your operating system or make major hardware changes -- or if you're the victim of a computer virus -- you may be considering reformatting your computer. If you need to format your hard drive, there's no reason to worry about what will happen to your World of Warcraft characters.
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Local vs. Cloud Storage
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Earlier titles from Blizzard either stored character information entirely on your local computer or as a mix between local and Internet (otherwise known as "cloud") storage. Diablo II, for example, kept character data on the user's hard drive, which meant that anyone with suitably advanced editing skills could make changes to their avatar that would give them an unfair advantage in online play. By contrast, World of Warcraft stores all character data on Blizzard's servers, not on the player's computer.
Advantages of Cloud Storage
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For players, cloud storage offers two key advantages. Firstly, because Blizzard stays in control of all World of Warcraft characters, you're guaranteed a fair fight when up against other player-controlled avatars -- you know that nobody has used offline editing programs to "hack" themselves upgraded items or character stats. Secondly, cloud storage means that you can play your characters on any computer with World of Warcraft installed, from your home PC to your laptop to a computer in an Internet café, without having to carry around a disk or hard drive with you.
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What's Stored on Your Computer
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Even though your character information isn't going to be lost if you format your hard drive, World of Warcraft does store some information -- like your computer's specifications, your personal option settings and what server you normally connect to -- in configuration files on your personal computer. If you wish to keep these intact when formatting, you'll have to back them up to another location -- otherwise, it will take a few minutes to set World of Warcraft back to your liking when you reinstall the game.
Backing Up Before a Format
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If you want to backup your local configuration files before a reformat, you have two options. The first is backing up your entire World of Warcraft directory, which may take up a lot of space on your backup media -- World of Warcraft requires over 25 GB of hard drive space. The second is backing up only your configuration directory, which is located in your main World of Warcraft folder. Look for the "WTF" directory, which contains the "Warcraft Text File" data including "config.wtf," the file that holds your personal settings.
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References
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