To back up your license, preferences, and other settings, you only need to back up the Settings Directory, which is listed in Wing IDE's About box, accessed from the Help menu.

The process of restoring Wing or moving to a new machine consists simply of installing Wing again, restoring the above directory, and reactivating your license if moving to a new machine.

The only other Wing-specific data that the IDE will write to your disk is in your project files (*.wpr and *.wpu if you are using the Shared style of project; see Project Types for details). We recommend using the default Shared project type and checking the *.wpr into revision control.

The *.wpu contains user-specific and machine-specific data such as environment, path, window position, list of open files, and other GUI state. The file is worth backing up, but usually not hard to recreate if lost.

Wing also writes to a cache directory (also listed in the About box) and your OS-provided temporary directory, but those can be recreated from scratch if it is lost. The only possible exception to this is autosave in the cache directory, which contains unsaved files open in the IDE.

For more information on the location of these directories, see User Settings Directory.

Sharing Settings

Many of the settings found in the User Settings Directory can be shared to other machines or with other users of Wing IDE. This includes the following files and directories:

Follow the links above to find details on the file formats involved. Most are simple textual formats that are easy to generate or modify if necessary. Wing does need to be restarted when replacing these files, and may overwrite changes made while it is running.