Character Config Backup - Insufficient

Good afternoon,

After extensive attempts to utilize the Character Config Backup service, I have determined that the current model is insufficient.

My situation:
I own a home PC tower where I play the game from home, and a laptop I use to play from college. My time window looks like this:
07:00 - I go to college. For hour chunks between classes, I play FFXIV on my laptop.
17:00 - I go home and boot up FFXIV on my PC tower.
24:00 - I finish for the night and go to sleep.

To be able to use the Character Config Backup service for the intended function of maintaining a consistent character configuration across my laptop and PC, I would need to be able to renew the backup data on the Square Enix servers at least once every 7 hours.

Problem:
Square Enix restricts character configuration backups to once every 24 hours. This renders the service neigh useless for my purposes.

My current experiment:
I'm a Computer Science major, and have been experiencing the use of Git for multi-user repositories and the like. I have begun this project at college, so am unable to see if the 2nd play location will be able to accept this experiment just yet.
I have created a Git Repository for my character's configuration folder.
https://github.com/ChaseNetwork/FFXI...4000174B4DB48A
This is working fine on my laptop for now, as file and folder names have not changed. When I'm done playing, I commit the changes to the files to the repository, then push it to the origin, keeping an up-to-date character configuration on a remote host.
Stage 2 of this experiment will be to pull this character configuration folder to my home PC tower, and see if my configuration setting remain consistent.
Should this work, I will judge the current Character Config Backup service a failure that does not meet need or expectation.

I find the 24 hour time limit for updating our character configurations to be odd to begin with. For the most part, these files don't consist of much more than text that describes how we have our character configured, and takes up about 1.24 MB of space. Meanwhile, Square Enix allows us to upload 2.93 MB sized screenshots of the game to our blogs whenever we want.

I know of other players who have made it work between two PCs with cloud synced backups of their character data, so I'd think your Git project would work. (Git may actually be a bit of overkill, since if you keep it synced each time, there shouldn't be any merging of changes necessary. But if you've already familiar with it for other projects, nothing wrong with using it just to sync two platforms.)

What this new service from SE is eventually supposed to offer is a bit more than holding and sending you back those text files, though. The big difference will come when they add the PS4 option (still listed as pending). Since PS4 stores its save files in a different format than the PC version of the game uses, SE is apparently doing some conversion to the data as it sends it out to make sure it's in the format for whichever platform you're on. For now, that process is useless as it's both receiving and sending back the PC version of those files, but as it's designed to eventually handle multiple systems with different formats, I'd assume it's still going through the process to check which platform you're on and generate the platform appropriate version (even though for now that means it's creating the same thing it had been given).

That still doesn't explain a once per day limitation, though. Even with a little extra processing there, this isn't something hard for a computer to do. Maybe they'll lift the restriction once they're more confident in the system. (They aren't outright calling this configuration backup feature a beta version, but the fact that it's available on some but not yet other systems sort of suggests it's still incomplete.)

Honestly, their system is more of an off site back. It's not really that well done for using several computers with the same account keeping the same configs.

I use to do this with my home computer and laptop using Google Drive. I'll try to explain some how I did it.

My FF14 character configs are stored here: C:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\FFXIV_CHR0040000000A21999
My local Google Drive that gets synced: D:\Google Drive\

Before continuing, BACKUP ALL FILES in your "C:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn"

1. Create somewhere on your Google Drive where you want to store the files. I used "D:\Google Drive\App-Data\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn"
2. Copy some or all the files from your FF14 configs to the Google Drive location. This can be used as a backup.

Now comes the tricky part. You will need to create a directory junction from your characters config fold to the one you copied to your Google Drive. To find out which one is for your character just look in each one for the latest time stamps on the files. Mine is "FFXIV_CHR0040000000A21999".

1. Open a command prompt and go to "C:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Games\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\"
2. Rename your characters folder to something like "FFXIV_CHR0040000000A21999.backup" (you can do this in windows explorer if you wish.
3. Type the following in the command prompt making sure to replace the folder names with the ones your character uses.

Code:

---

mklink /J "FFXIV_CHR0040000000A21999" "D:\Google Drive\App-Data\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\FFXIV_CHR0040000000A21999"

---

You should see the following: Junction created for FFXIV_CHR0040000000A21999 <<===>> D:\Google Drive\App-Data\FINAL FANTASY XIV - A Realm Reborn\FFXIV_CHR0040000000A21999

You will need to do this on both desktop and laptop. Make sure you're not in FF14 while setting this up either.

A few notes for this setup:
- You need the Google Drive client installed for this to work.
- When you exit FF14, give the Google Drive client a few minutes to sync up the files before you shut your computer down.
- If your desktop and laptop both run at different resolutions then you CAN NOT sync the entire character data directory. This was my case as my home runs 2560x1440 and laptop was 1920x1080. This means where I placed my UI elements were all out of wack on my laptop. I ended up having to create junctions for only a few files. In short all BUT the "HOTBAR.DAT" and "ADDON.DAT". Here is what each file is.

I hope this helps some.