User blog comment:Henzukaya/Terraria and Blackouts/@comment-14588660-20131231165019

This happened to me back in 1.1 (Not the blackup, but had a nearly complete world become corrupted). I was never able to find a way to recover the world file, so I ended up drifting away from the game for several months. Sad to say that even with map editors, or even a hex editor, I never got the world to load. Also, the backups made by Terraria itself did not work, so crutching on them is bad business.

I highly recommend writing a little script to backup your save files at least once a day. For my purposes I just used a batch file coupled with win7's robocopy. At the very end of the script, it opens Terraria. Essentially, what this does is create a backup of my saves every time I start the game. Means that starting the game takes a little longer, but I don't have to worry about losing my world or character to data corruption.

The script is really easy to build as a batch file (put it in /documents/my games). All you need to do is include the following line:

robocopy terraria terraria_bak_%date:~4,2%%date:7,2%%date:10,4% /s

That'll copy your entire save folder (characters and worlds) to a backup folder of the current day. You can also toss a "/A" at the end and it'll only copy the character and world files that have changed since you last ran the script; however, this means you might have to search through several backups if you want to find a specific backup. By backing up everything, it makes it easy to keep only the more recent backups. You can get even more fancy if you want, but really, copying your saves folder is all you need, though you'll want to go in there and delete your old backups manually from time to time.

Beyond that, just toss the path to terraria.exe at the end of the file and it'll execute after the backup.

Of course, if you have a lot of characters and worlds, you may want to keep the script seperate from the game launcher, as the more files you have to copy, the longer it'll take the game to launch.