Just wondering what backups you maintain for MSFS2024?  I guess most of us have backed up all of our addon scenery, airports, aircraft, etc but what about keeping  MSFS backups?  I suppose it makes sense to backup or keep copies of your UserCFG.opt file and MicrosoftGame.Config as well, but what about your setings and other files related to MSFS?  What backups do you need to keep and what is sored in the cloud (e.g your controller settings)?

Making sure you have copies of your Windows & MSFS product keys and keys for any other products you may have purchased as well.

Would just be interested to know what everyone is backing up and what may be or may not be necessary, particularly if you have to reinstall Windows, MSFS or both at some point (assuming that you have the hard drive space of course).

Edited October 26, 2025Oct 26 by cianpars

The only thing I back up is my control profiles (various for each piece of hardware, so it's about 12 files for me).  You can do this easily in the Controls screen > Export.

The Usercfg could be useful but if I lost this, I'd just reset the graphics and online settings in 5 mins.  I should probably back it up.

Of course if you have lot's of modifications in your Community folder, they are already backed up in there - MSFS2024 will not touch anything in there.

I've had to reinstall MSFS2024 only one, and it was a 15 minute affair.  Reinstall, import controls and reset graphics and online.

Edited October 26, 2025Oct 26 by JYW

Just backups of my control profiles.  I would not want to have to rebuild those from memory.  Otherwise, I save off 3rd party addons on a cloud drive along with any keys if applicable.  That's about it.

I keep a list of all 3rd party products anyway so I know what to reinstall if needed.  Honestly if something really big happened where I had to full reinstall, I'm probably starting over with just my key addons.  My community folder is filled with fantastic freeware airports that I'll probably never visit (or once).  

I don't do software backups. In 35 years of owning computers I never once had a drive failure. 

51 minutes ago, Farlis said:

I don't do software backups. In 35 years of owning computers I never once had a drive failure. 

You will now 😂

1 hour ago, Farlis said:

I don't do software backups. In 35 years of owning computers I never once had a drive failure. 

That's a bit like saying that in 35 years of driving you have never had an accident, so insurance is not required.

Edited October 26, 2025Oct 26 by Christopher Low

10 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

That's a bit like saying that in 35 years of driving you have never had an accident, so insurance is not required.

I'm not likely to crash my hard drive into anyone else. 

I keep a backup of my Community folder mainly because I fiddle so much with livery and camera settings that if I ever get an update to a payware aircraft, I can go back to the backup if I've forgotten any of the long winded changes I made. 

II have had one spinner and two SSD's fail on me going back about 10 years.  Albeit the two SSDs were early ones.  I only use SSDs like the Samsung 980Pro's now, and no spinners any more.

I back up about once a month now just in case.  Doesn't take long, even including a complete image of the Windows C: drive, which I keep to a minimum size, and NVMe SSD to NVMe SSD is really fast!

Just a question on this, I know where the aircraft camera files are, but are things like the assistance settings stored on line (in the account) now? 

I am talking about things like rudder assistance, POI labelling etc. because I remember when beta updates were wiping this info some time ago, and it was a right pain to set them all back.

Edited October 26, 2025Oct 26 by bobcat999

I use Backblaze to backup my entire disk on an hourly basis. If something were to go awry with my disk, it should be possible to retrieve the lost material. Backblaze also has a versioning feature that allows snapshots to be taken at a given point in time. I don't use that much, because I only have three controllers and can reprogram the lot in a couple of hours at most starting from scratch.