Re-activating your WoW account, or interested in "Trying Before You Buy"?How To Back Up Your Auctioneer Database To Another Machine
This entry was inspired by someone who bought and enjoyed my guide to Wealth on Warcraft, and who posted a question about how to deal with accessing WoW from their laptop on occasion when their desktop was not available.
One of my original posts about using Auctioneer but knowing it's up and downsides was back here.
I hope this helps! :)
Auctioneer Helps Players Gain Wealth
Auctioneer is an awesome addon which I use every day to post my plethora of auctions for my realmmates to buy in order to supply me with a steady flow of Wealth on Warcraft which I use for things like Epic Flying Mount training and gearing my lowbies, and everything in between.
But, if you have more than one computer you log into WoW from, you've discovered that your Auctioneer database from all the scans you did on one computer doesn't show up on your second one.
It's a real bummer whenever I go to visit my family and use their computer to login instead of my own... but there's a solution!
How To Transfer Auctioneer Data To Another Machine
WARNING! This requires you to fiddle around in your directory structure. If you're not comfortable with that, be sure to make a backup before making any changes, so it's easy to go back. Ultimately if something goes direly wrong, World of Warcraft itself has some ability to recover, but you may lose your saved addon information and have to re-build it. Be careful!
The process, however, is simple:
Exit out of World of Warcraft on both machines.
Go into your World of Warcraft directory on the machine you do the most Auctioneer scans with, and head into the WTF folder, then into "Account".
In there, you should see directories that are named after the usernames that have been used to log into World of Warcraft from your machine. If only you use it and you only have one account, there'll only be one directory present. If others have logged in using your machine or you have more than one account, there will be more.
Go into the directory of the account you've logged into to do your Auctioneer scanning, and then go into the "Saved Variables" directory.
Copy the file "Auc-ScanData.lua" over onto your Laptop, into the same directory location as where you found it on your original machine.
Start up World of Warcraft on the second machine (or second account if you're just copying from one account to another on the same machine) and voila! You should have the same scanned data available to you there as well.
Synch Files Regularly
Of course, this update is a one-time update, so you'll need to do it on a semi-regular basis if you'd like to keep the two databased synchronized. Or, you can start to do more scans on the second machine, and keep it up to date that way.
Good luck, and let me know if you have any problems or further questions!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!Related posts:
- Auctioneer: Downsides And Compensation, Part One
- Auctioneer Showing Pages Again… Weird
- Waiting Out The Down Time, Book of Crafts addon
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*Happy dance* Thank you so much for this. Your directions are so clear and straightforward you make it seem easy - and it is now I know how! Heading straight back to the AH to make my fortune.
This is sound advice. I regularly play on two different computers and synchronizing addon data, specifically Auctioneer, is a big benefit.
I'm not sure if I'm the only person who has this or not, but my Windows Vista installation ends up with all my Saved Variable information in a different location than normal.
For me, its located in....
C:\\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\\SavedVariables\auc-scandata.lua
I've not really seen anybody else write about this alternate location, so there may be something weird about how I run my Vista (maybe administrator rights or something like that), but this might be helpful for anybody who can't find the Auc-ScanData.lua file.
Hey there Amava! Thanks for the extra tip. I still have XP (purposely bought from Dell back in Nov so I could get XP when everyone else said "No, you can only get Vista") so mine hasn't moved.
Thank you for the extra information to help others with :)
I think I may have an alternative solution which should cause you less grief, strife, concern r what-have-you. An external HDD with your WoW game contents in it. Personally, since I play on a notebook primarily and have real concerns over heat and frame rates (which has a direct correlation as well), I use an SSD notebook drive housed in an eSATA/USB2 enclosure. Works fantastic, runs silent (no moving parts, duh) and improved my frame rates to boot.
They're a bit pricey when considering other external drive options, but ultimately, more portable when taking that drive to Gramma' for Turkey Day and you just need to log on to make cloth, Research Minor Inscriptions and so on.
Think it over,
Merri.
Additionally, you might look into using either the built-in software in Windows (xp-forward) to auto-sync specified folders (wow directory ftw?) which would allow you to update on either computer and automatically come up to current no matter which computer you're logging into.
As yet another option, I'm pretty sure that Mozilla Firefox Gmail addons (I've seen a couple that use your ample gmail storage for File storage) may have a solution for an alternative to using an expensive external-HD or a memory stick (either of which can be lost, stolen or ruined) for account variable portability as well.
The idea of using the external media for the entire install is amazing, and I'm surprised I never thought of it, but I'd be too paranoid about losing it and all my addon settings.
Just kickin in my two-cents.
I have 2 computers that I play from mostly, one at home, one at work (for lunchtime only! ;))
For my bank alt, I also want to keep as much data in my beancouner addon as possible too, so I keep my entire SavedVariables directory synced between the two. I still do it manually right now by RARing up the directory and emailing it or throwing it on a USB stick. I have a lot of data and it ends up at about 4MB in size