How to back up World of Warcraft (WoW)

Have you ever reinstalled your World of Warcraft? It is a huge pain. First it takes a while to install the base game and perhaps the expansion (Burning Crusade) from the CDs or the DVD. Then you have to download update after update, patch after patch. It might take a hole evening.

Imagine that one day you need to reinstall your Windows, or update to a new version. Perhaps your computer went bonkers and you've got to format and install Windows fresh. Perhaps you are updating from XP to Vista, and want a fresh install. Or maybe you even considering putting World of Warcraft on Linux? In either case you don't want to spend eternity reinstalling WoW from scratch. God forbid you'll lose all those addons you've added to the game and carefully configured for your playing pleasure.

Well all you need to do is to back up the World of Warcraft folder! This way you'll preserve everything you've installed and updated into WoW. If you performed a standard installation then the folder should be located in you Program Files directory.

You can copy this folder to another drive, or even burn to a DVD. However, if you have the Burning Crusade expansion installed, you'll probably need to either compress or zip the folder, since it will be over 5gig in size.

So, after you've installed you're operating system, aka Windows, you can now simply copy this folder to the new Program Files folder, Make a shortcut to the WoW Launcher, and start playing again! It's that simple!

You can use this procedure to copy your WoW to an extra computer, or even to a friends computer if you want to play there. Remember that since this is an online game the validation of the account is done online. So if you copy this to your friends computer, he will not be able to play unless he buys a copy of WoW and creates his own online account for WoW. But at least he will not have to go through the pain of downloading all the updates!

By the way, you can use the same procedure to play on Linux. Setup WINE on you Linux distro, and then copy the World of Warcraft to the Program Files folder in WINE's directory. Visit WowWiki.com and learn for wow Linux to get more details on how to set up WoW in Linux. Just don't use the Installation method, just copy the folder!