MSFS is still constantly resetting the assistance options, to the point where just scripting a simple “before .exe starts, back up the existing file (so that we can use that as fallback if we’re about to break everything) and then overwrite it with this specific backed up copy that has the settings we actually want” is the only way to stay sane.
I had a look at other posts about this but none of them seem to actually list the path (or regkeys) involved. And of course, it doesn’t matter whether the file is plain text or binary: all that matters is that it can be backed up, and overwritten with a “known good” copy. Telling git to track and reset single files is pretty much trivial, no need to ever manually edit anything.
Thank you for your post! Your topic has been moved to a subcategory of General Discussion & Community Support. The General Discussion category is meant for discussions that fall outside of our other sub-categories.
Please check out these other categories for your future posts:
- Aircraft
is where you discuss current or future planes coming to MSFS.
- World
is where you discuss scenery, airports, and weather.
- Aviate, Navigate, Communicate
is where you ask for help with flying.
- Tech Talk
is where you discuss graphics, drivers, performance, CTDs, and hardware.
- Menus & Activities
is where you discuss activities (landing challenges, bush trips, etc), plus anything accessed by the menus including the Marketplace, settings, logbook, cameras, etc.
This has been corrected in the SU14 Beta, and is scheduled for release this week.
However, if you want to know what you can copy to keep your files, that is the WGS folder in the SystemAppData folder.
“%SystemAppData%” is not a predefined Windows variable (unlike “%AppData%”), which actual location would you be thinking of?
In the main FS2020 installation:
That’s… still not super useful? I own MSFS2020 through steam, with the main installation being on drive M in a folder called MSFS2020. There is no “Microsoft.Flightsimulator_hashdigest” anywhere on that drive, nor is there a folder called SystemAppData anywhere on that drive. Additionally, a “dir Microsoft.FlightSimulator* /s /a” in my C:\Users\MyUserName directory does not show any matches.
Try in here:
x:\Steam\userdata[your Steam ID]\1250410`
that shows me a folder called “remote” and a file called “remotecache.vdf” (there is no “SystemAppData”).
The “remote” folder has the following content:
If that “remote” is the correct folder, which file, or set of files do I want to keep a backup of?
Sorry, I was sending you looking for the MSStore version.
I had to go look for the Steam address, as I had forgotten they were different!
The easiest is to keep the whole thing.
As you can see, even your logbook is there.
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No worries, we found it in the end. Cheers!
If one of these is specifically for the assistance options though, that’d be better than git-monitoring the entire folder (wouldn’t want to accidentally reset my logbook =D)
No, it’s hard to tell.
Some files in there are in English, others are in computer goobly-gook which is no help.
I guess for the logbook, just don’t put that back in.
Your latest settings are kept in the Cloud as well, and can be restored if you need to reinstall.
As it so happens I speak computer goobly-gook quite well (having written many binary data format parsers in my time) so that’s hardly a problem. Thankfully, git doesn’t care, it can track binary diffs, and it looks like the only file that gets updated on setting changes is profile_00 so I’ll just add everything else to the .gitignore and we should be good to go.
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Great stuff, glad you were able to find the correct items!
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And thank you for the help!
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Hi,
Quite why these settings have to be stored this way is baffling, they should be easy to read and in a location in the Documents folder for better access and certainly not reliant on storing on the Cloud.
I hope this is changed for MSFS2024.
Thanks
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@CraigRiga Please don’t hijack someone’s thread to complain about how MSFS does something you don’t like. If you have an improvement request for MSFS2024, this is not the thread to make that known, it just derails a question and answer thread that other people may find in the future looking for the same “where is this data stored” information.
@TonyMM888 for the Steam edition, it’s in the "userdata[your Steam ID]\1250410\remote` folder inside your Steam application folder. Then for me the actual file in question was “profile_00” (which I assume will be the same for most folks).
