Auto Sync And Backup World of Warcraft Interface Settings To Cloud Storage For Free

This particular article will focus on making World of Warcraft interface settings sync across multiple computers. This guide is also related to another one of my articles called How To: Auto Sync And Backup Any Savegames On The Cloud For Free. You can look there to see how to auto sync savegame and folder for other games.


World of Warcraft Interface Folders Introduction
All of your World of Warcraft interface settings are stored in a number of places:

X:\[World of Warcraft]\Interface\
This folder contains all of your downloaded AddOns.

X:\[World of Warcraft]\WTF\[ACCOUNTNAME]\
This folder contains all of your other AddOn settings such as the position of chat windows, the settings on Recount, etc.

X:\[World of Warcraft]\WTF\
Within your WTF folder is a file called 'Config.wtf'. This file contains details specific to your computer such as resolution and detail. We will avoid syncing this folder and the 'Config.wtf' folder because it may cause problems with the display of your AddOns unless your target computer has the same aspect ratio.

You may not want to sync the 'Config.wtf' file to another computer unless it has identical performance and resolution.

The rest of the settings such as spells on action bar placement (unless using an AddOn bar like Bartender) and friends lists etc. are stored on Blizzard's own cloud and do not need to be backed up.

Auto Sync And Backup Any Savegames On The Cloud For Free

Or How To Integrate Steam Cloud Features Into Any Game

Updated 19th January 2011: changed name of Windows Live Sync Beta to Windows Live Mesh 2011 to reflect name change of the service. At present, the program, service and UI are identical to Live Sync Beta.

A World of Warcraft Interface folder being synced.

The Steam Cloud is a service that allows the synchronizing of savegames and settings from one computer to another. This means that one could play a Steam game on one computer, and then when logging into Steam on another computer their savegames and preferences would automagically be transferred. This is a feature on many Steam games such as Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead, Torchlight, Trine, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Plants vs Zombies etc. However, although Steam Cloud is not available for all games it is still possible to sync savegames over the cloud using a program called Windows Live Mesh 2011. This free utility offers 2gb of storage (soon to be upgraded to 5gb) as well as automatically cloud syncing and peer to peer syncing.

Windows Live Mesh 2011 is far superior for the purposes of PC gamers to other popular syncing cloud services such as Dropbox. This is because Dropbox only allows a single designated Dropbox folder to be automatically synchronized. If you wanted to have automatic backup and syncing of say, your Mass Effect save game, you would have to either 1) manually copy the files or 2) create a fiddly symbolic link. Windows Live Mesh 2011 allows you to specify individual folders. This makes it possible to be extremely flexible in exactly what you want to synchronize. Windows Live Mesh 2011 also gives the option of direct peer to peer transfer bypassing the cloud, which gives a very good performance boost to certain syncs between computers and networks. Anyone who has used Dropbox or older versions of Mesh will know that it takes a long time to sync large files only through the cloud, so the peer to peer option is welcome.


Guide To Syncing Any Savegames Using Windows Live Mesh 2011

Step 1) Download the latest version of Windows Live Mesh 2011 using this link: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta. Windows Live Sync Beta is only available as part of the Windows Live Essentials Beta package. Make sure you only install what you need to (make sure to install Live Sync).