Think back - what windows or applications were on your screen, what keys did you press, what did you click on or what did you drag?

For me the easiest thing to do would be in windows explorer, in the MyDocuments\LDW folder, I would click once on the Plant Tycoon folder, then type Control-C (copies it), then type Control-V (pastes it) which would create a new folder called Copy of Plant Tycoon. Every few days I would do this again. Future copies would be named by the computer "Copy (2) of Plant Tycoon" and "Copy (3) of Plant Tycoon" etc.

If something went wrong with game 3, I could find Plant Tycoon3.ldw in one of the backup folders, click on it once, press control-C to copy it, then go to the real Plant Tycoon folder, click on Plant Tycoon3.ldw once, then click on the name once so it is highlighted, change its name to Plant Tycoon3OLD.ldw, press enter or click in the white area to make the change permanent, then click control-V to copy the backup version to this folder, and that should do it.

thanks ,borg again for your great programs, but i finished the game once {all 529 & all bugs} and i'm 7 plants away from completing game 2. when i told all that i got all 529, everyone asked me if i used vst, which i did not. i got many relpies, saying they did not think we could get all plants without vst. yes you can!

Borg I think my problem is they may still be there but I can not open them for some reason. It asks what program do you want to use to open these files? and no matter what I use they will not open. They must have gotten corrupted when I copied them. Maybe I even got a virus?? Its a mystery but at least now Im up to 3 magics in the new game. I have a feeling I did not close PT when I downloaded VST and that started the problem. User error. LOL
Thanks for all your help and ideas. I keep trying to go back and open the files but they just wont open. Im afraid I should have just let well enough alone without tring to change the game. I had all 6 magics, all the bugs, and half a million dollars. Oh well I will get a million this time around and all the plants

I don't think you have to worry about a virus or anything like that being the cause of the problem, and it's too bad that you lost all that hard work.

Just a word of caution for the future, though: you should never try to open any of the files that have the .ldw extension. The only program that knows what to do with them is our game. Windows will not know what to do with them, and if you attempt to do more than just back them up or copy them, they may become corrupted and unusable. Borg's suggestion above is a very safe way to back them up, as is following the procedures here in the Guides Section.

If Plant Tycoon wanted you to be able to open .ldw files directly, when the program installed itself it would have registered the .ldw suffix with windows so that windows would know what program to use to open them.

So that is why you get the message about "what program do you want to use to open it with". You could of course open the list of programs and browse to programfiles\planttycoon and use plant tycoon.exe to open the file. However, that won't really work. All that will do is start plant tycoon. Plant tycoon won't play the file you selected, it will play the last game you played in plant tycoon, as it always does. And manually registering .ldw files with windows as "Plant Tycoon" files is not a good idea anyway, as the .ldw suffix is used for other ldw games, not just plant tycoon.

Knowledge is a good thing so I will close with some of that. Here is a run down of the save game file names in your Plant Tycoon save game folder:
Plant Tycoon0.ldw - this is not a game but rather think of it as a table of contents of sorts that lists information about your plant tycoon games. information such as name of game and which game you are currently playing, etc.
Plant Tycoon1.ldw - this is the plant tycoon game you have in game slot 1.
Plant Tycoon2.ldw - this is the plant tycoon game you have in game slot 2.
Plant Tycoon3.ldw - this is the plant tycoon game you have in game slot 3.
Plant Tycoon4.ldw - this is the plant tycoon game you have in game slot 4.
etc.
There is also a log file which is a text based file that you can open in wordpad or whatever your favorite word processor is. Read it one day if you are bored.

Have a really nice day,
-Borg

I now have 4 magic plants and a fountain so I am happy. Im getting the magics a lot faster this go round.

Now have 5 And another game going just in case

All six yay Only took me 9 days this go On the way to being a millionaire. Last magic was the nox so now I can make some real money. Funny, in the second game I got the nox first and was going broke trying to get it in the first so I deleted the second game and finally got it today.

Bravo!! Congratulations!!

Borg, thank you thank you thank you! You are such a genius!!!! I was complaining to my hubby that I needed more space for seeds, downloaded VST and I LOVE IT!!!! I can play around with the breeding so much easier now! Again, thank you.