This is an issue that I know I've asked before in other threads & gotten some answers to, but I haven't asked these specific questions before so I'm making a new thread for it.
I expect I'll be doing a reformat of my hard drive in the near future & doing a clean re-instal of windows. Before I do so, I want to be sure that all my savegames & achievement progess etc from AG will still be in tact when I log in after doing the reformat. I've been playing on Armorgames for several years, it's my #1 main website for playing browser games on, and I there are some games on here I've been playing intermittently for YEARS, gradually progressing towards winning and/or completing all achievments, so it's seriously important to me to keep my progress & not have to start over.
(In case of tl;dr, you can skip past the next 4 paragraphs to get to my specific question.)
One of the reasons I'm asking is because my experiences have been inconsistent/contradictory, so I'd like to get clear & confident advice so I can be prepared.
First of all I used to have a different computer when I started playing on ArmorGames. Eventually (a little over a year ago) my computer broke & I had to buy a whole new one (with a different OS too). When I came to AG on my new computer, my saved games & stuff were still here, to my delight. In fact I've even been able to play some games on different computers in my house & still access my saved progress each time.
I know that some games save their data on my hard drive (such as Wonderputt for example), and others save it online (like Kingdom Rush gives the option to do). But a couple months ago I ran a new version of a registry cleaner I have, and when I came to AG I found that ALL my saved data was completely erased (even Kingdom Rush). Since I always make a back-up of my registry whenever running a registry-cleaner, I was able to restore from that backup & thankfully all my data was returned. (Although another games site I've also been playing on for years, Newgrounds, lost its data too but it didn't get restored when from my registry backup. I've no clue why, but I hardly use that site anymore because of the progress that I've now lost.)
I used to run registry-cleaners & other utility/maintenance programs on a regular basis, but I've been reluctant to ever since that happened. (I did uninstall that aforementioned new program, but I still have others.) Also last time I cleaned my main browser's cookies/temporary-internet-files, I did it in such a way that rather than letting a program clean them all, I went & manually selected & deleted everything that didn't have a name indicating it was related to ArmorGames; and also since then I only play AG on the one browser, on this one computer.
*** WHAT I'M ASKING FOR *** Right before I reformat, when I backup everything on my computer that I want to keep, I would like to also be able to back-up any files on my hard drive that have ArmorGames data, so that when I come back to AG afterwards, if my saves are gone then I can restore them from the backed-up files. The problem is, I have no clue what the files are & what folders they are in, & I'm pretty sure there are files that get saved in different locations too. I know that some stuff gets saved as cache, and I think some stuff gets saved as cookies... & I only have a vague understanding of what the difference is.
So basically, if anyone knows (or can find out) what files I should be looking for & and exactly what folders they can be found in (that I can find/see/copy using Windows Explorer), please let me know, so I can be sure to save them.
(It might even be good for me to know so I can make a backup before using any new utility program, in case one erases my stuff again but doesn't give me way to restore like last time.)
My OS is Windows 7 (Home Premium 64-Bit edition) The browser I play on is Firefox.
...now, where do I find the AppData folder to begin with?
In the left-hand part of Explorer there's the folder-tree. It has folders such as "Libraries", "Homegroup", "Computer" (which as a subfolder each for my hard drive, and my 2 dvd drives), A folder that's my name & has lots of subfolders (Desktop, Download, Favorites, My Documents, My Music, Saved Games, etc).
In other words, what's the full file-path for the folder you listed above, starting from the beginning?
