I’m a big fan of World War II action games, first person shooters. I love ’em. Recently I’ve become highly enamoured of Call of Duty, World At War, also known as COD 5.
Yes, I play online. If you’re on the Pacific coast, you can join me on the PotW servers, where I play as my online persona [BR]ServerError. I enjoy killing a few bad guys every so often to break up my day, plus I play with my kids. Nothing beats a round of Nazi Zombies to bring the family closer.
Recently, my son had a problem with his COD5. His computer crashed and he instantly lost his rank within the game. That was disappointing to him, because he’d been playing for months and had earned quite an advanced ranking.
It turns out that there are two instances when COD5 zeroes out your rank. The first, and most common, is when you cheat during online play. My son does not cheat.
The second instance happens when a local file becomes corrupt. The only solution for that is to restore your local data from a backup. Sadly, my son has not backed up his computer, which means he has to start building his online rank over again from scratch. Still, the episode got me thinking.
Below is a copy of a batch file I wrote to backup the local copy of my COD5 data on my Windows Vista PC:
xcopy %LOCALAPPDATA%\Activision\CoDWaW\players\profiles\playername\*.* %HOMEPATH%\Documents\CoDWaW.bak\*.* /s
Replace playername above with the name of your online character. Save the file as CoDWaWbak.bat in your main folder, then run the command to backup your online player data. Or, better still, place a shortcut to CoDWaWbak.bat in the Startup folder in the All Programs menu. That way the files are backed up each time you start Windows.
When you run the command, or batch file, the data files from your online player folder are duplicated in a folder called CoDWaW.bak in your Documents folder. If anything ever happens to your online player data, you can quickly restore the files from the duplicates. In Windows Vista, the files are stored in this folder:
\Users\your-account-name\AppData\CoDWaW\players\profiles\your-online-player-name\
That may save you some heartache in the future. Then again, if you heed my advice on file backup, you can simply restore the files from a backup and get your player data back.
