UDC's are all blank out and wiped. Menu entries remain from prior entries?

[Jeeves]

I had a number of UDC's that are all gone, no idea what happened or when. Some I hadn't used in months, but my UDC.dat file is empty.
Similarly; The 'autobackup' has an empty UDC as well, but it's copy is only 1 day old.

I presume this occurred somewhere in the last month as well, but I don't know when; That said, there was some complex regex I lost.

What's strange, is that the menus still show blank entries, there's just no regex behind them:

Blank-Menus-2026-09-06_162239.png

And all the lines in the Manage UDC tool show unique/empty lines with unique Command ID's:

UDC-Shows-blank-lines-2026-09-06_162239.png

Unfortunately; I lost a bunch of good regex because I didn't use the option frrequently enough to notice the feature was broken and by the time I had, the autobackup was trashed too.
So, I am suggesting a feature, something like: "Maintain ___#____ changes to configuration files"

1. This can be a configurable option, on/off/1-30 (or whatnot).
2. On XY shutdown: Compare .dat files to prior backuped up copies.
3. if hash matches last backed up hash, do nothing: Fiies match.
4. For each file that differ, suffix the date to the file and copy it into directory.
5. With this feature; It doesn't matter if you're 3 years later and realized you broke a UDC/KS/FVS/Tags/ini/Catalog, if the file hasn't been changed often, the backups are still valid and useful.

[admin]

Impossible to say what caused this.
As to your wish: A bit over the top, isn't it?

[Jeeves]

Impossible to say what caused this.
As to your wish: A bit over the top, isn't it?

Not particularly? I have systems and tools that keep deltas for years. I even have tools that allow you to see all the changes you've made since X point in time and revert any one of them, essentially a localized git.

So; Wishful? Maybe. However, for an application that may be launched and exited many many times during a single day, that single backup does not do much good outside of 'whoops, I hit delete on that ini/dat file...'. Perhaps that's the goal, but I'm suggesting a feature to add robustness.

Even removing the delta idea, there would be vast benefit in a system that lets you keep # number of backups, or # number of days worth of backups, and that's essentially little more than a macro/script on startup/shutdown.

[admin]

In XYplorer\appdata\AutoBackup\24 you find older backups.

[Jeeves]

In XYplorer\appdata\AutoBackup\24 you find older backups.

I am aware, but even then, that's two copies, the autobackup and it's subdirectory \24.
The timestamp difference between those two files (on my system) is only 24 hours and both, as such, are are empty.

As I mentioned previously; I would bet that most users do not use every feature every launch. Furthermore, many of the features may only be used on occasion. Because of that; Noticing that something is damaged/changed/lost takes time. So, I still bolstering this backup option would be a great feature even without the 'delta' portion and it seems like the framework is already in the application already.

[Horst]

I use a deduplication ZPAQ backup after every XY update.
This way I can restore any files or version from the past
without getting a very large archive.

[Jeeves]

I use a deduplication ZPAQ backup after every XY update.
This way I can restore any files or version from the past
without getting a very large archive.

Is this something you've shared that I might find somewhere?

I think there's lots of value in XY extending the built-in backup capabilities, but I understand that my request carries little weight as well.