How do I backup my mod-list for a MO reinstall ?

[Amywalker730]

Hello everyone. Two days ago I ran into a disastrous problem. Mod Organizer crashed and since then there have been no end of problems. I don't have much of an idea about how to fix it as I can't say that I did anything at all to cause such a problem, but to hopefully fix it I've decided to reinstall Mod Organizer. 

 

My question is how do I save the 378 mods that I have installed into Mod Organizer? The last thing that I want to do is lose them as it took me months to ensure comparability between them all.

[Greg]

If you downloaded the mods with Mod Organizer, they should all be in the Mod Organizer\downloads folder so you can copy that one folder somewhere safe and reinstall them in the new instance of Mod Organizer. If you downloaded the mods with the browser instead of Mod Organizer, you may have to chase them down depending on where you saved them. By default browsers typically save files in your user profile Downloads folder (e.g. C:\Users\\Downloads). If you've deleted the downloaded versions of the mods, you may have to download them again.

 

A possibly secondary alternative that should be used as an extreme last resort... The installed version of every mod is in its own folder in the Mod Organizer\mods directory. In other words, you should see folders like "aMidianBorn - Content Addon", "aMidianBorn Blade of Woe". Each folder is one mod. In theory, you can right click each folder (one folder at a time), Send To, Compressed Folder. This creates a file named "aMidianBorn - Content Addon.zip" that is a mod that you can install with Mod Organizer. Just click Install Mod, point to the ZIP file you created, and OK.

 

Please keep in mind that this is the currently installed version of that mod, so it will not have any options that you did not install. In other words, if Mod A has optional patches for Falskaar and Wyrmstooth, these optional patches will not be in this folder if you didn't check them when installing the mod. Also keep in mind that this folder will have any optional patches that you installed, so you need to make sure you still have masters for these.

 

For some friendly advice, and I hope I'm not coming across like a donkey here because this not my intention.

 

When you download mods from Nexus, you will most likely want to reinstall these mods again in the future without having to download them from scratch (especially the monsters like Static Mesh Improvement Mod). Downloading mods with Mod Organizer is super easy, but I highly recommend taking a minute outside Mod Organizer to organize these mods into a structure that makes sense so you can easily find and reinstall them in the future. Most of these have fairly sensible names like "Unlimited Bookshelves 1-7-10891-1-7.zip", but I don't have a clue where "Hearthire Edition Cleaned-11555.zip" came from. For this reason, I always create folder with the same name as the mod (say Skyrim Performance Plus) and move the main file and all the optional files for this mod into this folder. Yeah, it's somewhat of a pain in the butt up front but it's saved me an enormous amount of time on each new setup.

[echo451]

I would add the '<MO>/profiles' folder to the 'download' and 'mods' folders. Back these three up and you can always recover to a know previous state.

 

At least that's been my experience.

 

I also switch the download folder around. So you can keep sets of mods you will want to reinstall. For examples mods that need to be reinstalled if you are adding removing other mods. Sets of mods for a given theme. This help to keep things nice and clean.