How to back up your roleplay characters

Charahub switched off on 1 March 2019. There was no warning email. Every character and every picture on it went at the same time, and none of it came back.

“How do I back up my characters” has been a standing question on the sites people moved to ever since. It deserves a better answer than the ones it usually gets.

What counts as a backup

A backup passes three tests:

1. It sits on storage you control. Your own drive, or a cloud account in your own name.
2. It opens with the site switched off. If it needs the site to be up, it is a bookmark.
3. You have opened it since you made it. An untested backup is a guess.

Most of what people call a backup fails the second test.

A list of links is not a backup

Plenty of sites will hand you a file of your characters. Open it and look at what’s inside.

If the pictures are web addresses rather than files, that export dies with the site it came from. On the day you need it, every one of those links returns nothing. You’re left with a tidy record of what you used to have.

The fix is dull and it works: save the pictures themselves as well as the words.

What to save

Three things, in this order.

• The pictures, at full size. The copy a site shows you is often shrunk to fit the page. If you still have the file you uploaded, that’s the one to keep.
• The words, as plain text. A .txt file opens on any machine you’ll ever own. A page saved from a website often does not.
• Which picture belongs to whom. This is the part people lose. A folder of 400 pictures with no names isn’t a library, and sorting it out later is a job nobody does.

Let the folders do the sorting

One folder per character. Inside it, a text file with the description and the pictures that go with it. Nothing clever, no software needed, still readable in ten years.

For day to day work this is the wrong shape, and I’ve written about why tags beat folders for the library you actually use. A backup is the one place where plain folders win, because they need nothing to read them.

If you’re not sure which words are worth keeping, the short version is in what to put in a character reference.

How often to do it

After any session where you added something worth losing sleep over. If that sounds like too much, set a reminder for every three months.

Always export before you move to a new site, cancel anything, or let an account go quiet.

Check it once a year

Pick a character at random. Open the folder with your network off.

If the pictures show and the text reads, you’re done. If half the images are grey boxes, you’ve just found out on a good day rather than a bad one.

When a site says it is closing

Export that day. Not at the weekend, and not once things calm down. You’re sharing the exits with everybody else who read the same email.

Then read what the notice actually promises. Some say your files stay downloadable until the end. Some say nothing at all, which is its own answer.

What re:plyr promises, and what it does not

Hold this site to the same test.

The terms say I will use reasonable endeavours to give you at least 30 days’ notice by email before shutting the service down, and that the export keeps working for the whole of that notice period.

Reasonable endeavours is the honest wording, and the same clause says what can undo it. The notice cannot apply where closure is forced by law, by a court or a regulator, or by something outside my control, such as a supplier dropping a service the site is built on. In those cases there may be no notice period at all. That’s the case this whole post is about, and no service this size can promise its way out of it.

The terms also say I do not undertake to keep your work or to be able to restore it, and they tell you to keep your own copies of anything you would not want to lose. This post is the long version of that sentence.

Three things about the downloads, because each one changes what you should do:

• They need an account you can sign in to. A suspended account cannot use them, because records are kept while a complaint is being looked into.
• There are two downloads. The archive holds your writing and the pictures themselves, with a page for each character and scenario that opens with no internet and no account. The data file is the same writing with a link to each picture. Neither holds the written reasons behind anything I’ve done to the account, which you can ask for.
• A big archive starts again if it’s interrupted. It’s built as it downloads, so use a connection you trust and open it before you rely on it. A very large library won’t fit in one archive, and the account page says so if yours doesn’t.

One more, about the account rather than the downloads. If nobody signs in for 9 months, I may close it and delete what’s in it, after 30 days’ warning by email. That is in the terms as well. It’s also why “export before you let an account go quiet” is advice I have to take as seriously as anybody.

The best backup is a boring one: your own drive, plain files, checked once a year. It costs an afternoon. Charahub cost people five years.