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Backup

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Settings → Backup packs everything you have set up into one snapshot — commands, timers, scenarios, auction lots, widget styling, the panel layout, every module setting and the list of installed modules — and puts it back after a reinstall or on another computer. The same snapshot can be kept as a file on this machine or on straimer.com; the contents are identical, the cloud is only another place to put it.

Saving a copy to a file

This needs no account, no subscription and no server of ours.

  1. Open Settings → Backup. The first card is Save settings to a file.
  2. Decide about statistics. Donation history and stream totals is small and worth taking; Chat messages and viewer counts is tens of thousands of rows. Ticking the second ticks the first as well — messages and viewer samples hang off streams and have nowhere to go without them. The number of rows in each is printed beside its checkbox.
  3. Press Save to file. A Windows save window opens with straimer-settings- and today's date already filled in, pointing at Documents; put the file wherever you like.
  4. Read the line that appears beside the button: "Saved N settings. Left out (passwords and tokens): N". If you took statistics, the number of records follows; and if some of those settings point at sound or image files, the line ends with how many — see "Sounds and images stay behind".

Saving a copy to the cloud

  1. Sign in first, under Settings → strAImer Account.
  2. Back on Settings → Backup, in the card Cloud copies, press Save to cloud. The statistics checkboxes at the top of the page decide what goes in, exactly as for a file.
  3. Refresh lists what is stored — date, app version and size of each copy — and prints how much of your space is used: "N MB of N MB used, up to 5 copies".

Uploading needs an active subscription. On the Free plan the quota is zero: Save to cloud is greyed out and the line beside it reads "Saving to the cloud requires a subscription". Lite, Pro and Ultra get 200 MB, 1 GB and 3 GB.

Five copies per account. Uploading a sixth removes the oldest by itself, and so does running out of space — you never have to clear room by hand. A copy you no longer want can also be deleted from the list.

Cloud copies are not encrypted, and the app says so on that card: they hold your commands, scenarios and donation history.

Making a copy on its own

Off by default. This is the usual answer to "I was sure it backed itself up" — nobody turned it on.

  1. In the card Save on exit, tick Save a copy when closing strAImer. The rest of the card is greyed out until you do.
  2. Choose where it goes: To a file on this computer, To the cloud (subscription required) or Both.
  3. Include statistics as well adds donation history and stream totals to it.
  4. Choose folder… picks where local copies land. Left alone, they go to the default folder printed beside the button.

The copy is made when strAImer closes — the one moment when the stream is over and the data is complete — and no more than once an hour, so five restarts in a row do not push out the whole history. If it takes longer than 15 seconds, the app closes without it.

The last 5 automatic files are kept and older ones are deleted. Files you exported by hand and the safety copies made before a restore are never rotated away.

If the target is the cloud and the account is not signed in, the copy is skipped without a word.

What never travels

Platform sign-ins, stream keys, passwords and API tokens are never in a copy. That is deliberate and permanent, and not only a policy: they are encrypted with a key tied to your Windows account, so on another machine they would be unreadable anyway. The app also looks inside the values, not just at setting names, so a setting that merely happens to hold a token is left out too and counted in the "left out" line.

After restoring on a new computer, sign in to every platform again. Expect it; nothing is broken.

Signing in on the new computer signs the old one out. This is confirmed on Twitch and on DonationAlerts: the moment you connect one of them on the second machine, the first one stops receiving from it — chat goes quiet, the bot stops answering, donations stop arriving. Nothing is broken there either, and the fix is the same in reverse: sign in again on whichever machine you want to stream from. The other platforms have not been checked, so expect the same from them: if you stream from one computer and play on another, connect the platforms on the machine you actually stream from.

Logs do not travel. Neither does the old machine's live state: what showed as connected there is worked out again here, not restored.

Sounds and images stay behind

Settings point at files on disk — alert sounds, alert images, the sound a scenario plays — and the snapshot carries the setting, not the file. That is why the export line counts how many settings do this: it tells you whether there is anything to copy at all.

Images live in %APPDATA%\straimer\images. Sounds live in %APPDATA%\straimer\sounds, unless you picked your own folder on Settings → Sound. Copy the files over under the same names and the restored settings find them.

The voice pack is the exception, and it is good news: it is downloaded, not yours to carry. The new machine fetches it again on Voice → Voices, with the Download voices button at the top of the page.

Restoring

  1. For a file: Restore from a file → Choose a file…. For a cloud copy: Restore beside it in the list.
  2. A confirmation appears before anything is written. It shows the snapshot's date and the app version that made it, how many settings and how many modules are inside, which of those modules are not installed here, and how many passwords or tokens were found in the file and skipped. Press Restore.
  3. The current state is saved to a file first, automatically. Its path is in the "Settings restored" window that follows — a restore can always be undone.

Restoring merges rather than wipes: settings that already exist are overwritten, statistics are added with duplicates skipped, so restoring the same file twice does not double the history. Settings belonging to modules the snapshot never heard of are left alone.

Which modules run comes back too, and in both directions. The snapshot records whether each module was on or off, and the restore brings this machine to that state: what was running is started, what you had switched off on the other computer is switched off here as well. Only modules named in the snapshot are touched.

A restored panel layout needs the window reloaded. The app says so — "The Control Panel layout came with the backup. Reload the window to see it." — and offers Reload now. Until then the panel keeps showing the layout this machine had before.

Restore refused

Modules that were not installed

A module present in the snapshot but missing on this machine gets its settings restored and its record created switched off, with no files. The "Settings restored" window lists them and offers to fetch them: the button says Install missing modules.

They are downloaded one at a time, with Installing module 1 of 3… beside the restore button as it goes, and the result is reported as Installed 3 of 3 modules. Anything that failed is named, and one failure does not stop the rest. The reload prompt follows, because the panel tiles of those modules appear only after it.

Declining is fine. The settings stay in the database and are picked up whenever the module arrives, whether you install it a minute later or next month.

They arrive switched off. The restore recorded them off, and installing does not change that, so turn them on afterwards — the "Module Catalog" guide, section "Turning a module on and off", says where the switch is.

The hotkey helper has to be finished by hand

Whether the helper is on travels in the snapshot. The Windows scheduled task it runs from does not — that is not a setting but an object on the old computer.

So on the new machine the helper looks switched on and nothing fires in games. The page says it plainly: "The helper is on in your settings, but it has not been set up on this computer yet. Turn it on to finish — Windows will ask for administrator rights once." The button beside that line says Turn on, and pressing it finishes the setup instead of switching the helper off. Where that page is: the "Control Panel" guide, section "Hotkeys".

After a subscription ends

New uploads stop, but downloading and restoring keep working — the copies are yours. Statistics are stripped out of stored snapshots 30 days after the subscription lapses, and the snapshots themselves are deleted a year after. Each copy in the list carries the date this will happen to it, highlighted once that date is within 30 days.

What you cannot do here