Essential Housing Tools Editor question

tom_riker01

Okay, fellow builders, I have a serious question for you all. The Essential Housing Editor backs up a copy of your current house build up to five times, making a new backup every time you enter the house.

This means the builder is making backup files somewhere on my hard drive. SO, it stands to reason that if I could locate those files, COPY it and then restore it later on, that would give me the ability to build an entire city. [Save the backup in the housing editor, then copy the appropriate file and then rename it later on, thus allowing me to recreate the entire city months down the line]

The question is: Where is the Essential Housing Editor storing these backup files?! (As someone who RP's and uses houses as props, this knowledge would be invaluable!)

bls61793_ESO

TLDR: Backup data is in the EssentialHousingTools.lua under SavedVariables
So... I was looking for this information myself and was disappoined to find that no one ever answered the question.

Therefore, I went digging to find the answer myself, so here it is:

The backup data for each house is embedded in that Houses' array under another "Backups Array" inside of the EssentialHousingTools.lua (SavedVariables)
Thankfully that means that you don't really have to worry about losing your backups when updating etc.

However, since it is embedded in the LUA file, your best way to save a backup separate is literally going to be to copy and paste the backup data to and from the .lua and a separate text file (which may be a bit error prone--so I would always make a back up copy my saved variables file first).
(Quick aside: ZOS really should give us the ability to reset our homes by default; however, I understand how this is problematic since the player may have traded away or sold the housing items provided with the house.)