You will begin by creating a fresh profile using the SPT-AKI launcher. By following this tutorial, you'll prepare everything needed to proceed with the next steps.
In this part you will be doing the following:
1. Create a new profile
2. Identify your newly created profile.
3. Learn how to back up a profile simply.
## Legend
The table below is a set of "expressions" that will be used to avoid writing informations that might not apply to your use case, such as the path to your SPT-AKI installation, or a randomly generated value.
`%profileID%` | File containing a profile. | `C:\Games\SPT-AKI\Server\user\profiles\9dbfcbf0d3be487b9ac20cd8.json`
## Creating a new profile
You want a way to fool around in SPT-AKI but without also ruining the fun of having a character evolving normally. As such creating a new dedicated profile is probably the best way of achiving this goal.
To create a new profile:
1. Start SPT-AKI's server by going into `%game%\server\` and double clicking on the server executable.
2. Start SPT-AKI's launcher by going into `%game%\` and double clicking on the launcher executable.
> At this point the profile file is already created but the file is mostly empty. The profile still need to go through the onboarding process in the game, that will populate the file much more.
Now that you have created a new profile, you will need to identify it in the server files. Profiles are stored with a unique random ID and as such it may seem hard to know where and which file to look for.
After a bit of research you should have now identified which profile you want to use and can proceed with the next step.
> **Alternative "quick" way**\
> You can quickly identify a profile ID by checking for which profile are the request sent to the server. The ID will be listed at the start of each server request in the server window. Once you've identified the profile ID, you can directly go look for the profile file with the same name in `%game%\Server\user\profiles\`.
> This section talk about a good practices that could save you some time in case of a error or a corrupted profile. If you want to just move on with the next steps you can directly go to the [next page](./#tutorials/tut_0/tut0_2.md).
Making a profile backup will allow you to not loose your work if you make a mistake while editing your profile. It's also very usefull in case of profile corruption due to a server error and/or improper profile save.
To backup a profile, it's recommanded to create a new folder outside of any of the folders used by the server to write data (like `%game%\Server\user\profiles\`) and to create a `backups` folder at the root of the server directory.
This way, if you ever wanted to roll back and/or restore a corrupted profile, you would just need to go get a previous version of it and copy/paste it over the faulty file.
