How to Back Up your City of Heroes Characters

With less than a week until City of Heroes shuts down forever (and if that angers you as much as it does me, go take a look at how NCSoft's stocks are tanking to help take the edge off), it's time to discuss how best to preserve your character data in the slim hope that Plan Z -- "a new MMO in the spirit of CoH but owned by the community and with its own IP so as to be completely free of NCSoft in any way, shape, or form" -- actually comes to fruition.

So here's what I know, and if anyone else sees a mistake or knows a better way to do it, please leave a comment below!

1. Download the Sentinel+ extractor.
2. Log in to City of Heroes. 
3. Pick the character you want to save and enter the game. 
4. In the text box, write /info_self and hit enter. 
5. Tab out of CoH and run the extractor by double-clicking the icon. 
6. A window will pop up, telling you that you have successfully saved the character. 
7. Log out of the character and repeat. 

Now, a few disclaimers:

• I have no idea if this will save Supergroup or Auction House data, so if you have goodies in the AH or base storage that you want saved, it's a good idea to pull them into personal inventory before you run the extractor. 
• Similarly, if you have stuff in the mail like enhancements or influence, you might want to grab that too. 
• Your data will be saved in the same folder as the extractor. I really, really, really recommend you back it up to the cloud or a thumb drive or a CD-ROM or whatever, just in case your hard drive suddenly decides to stop working. 

Finally, if you are a long-time player with tons of characters and whose subscription has lapsed, you will find yourself in a bind as you will likely have more characters than unlocked slots. Fear not! There is a way around this.

1. If you have Paragoin Points left over, you can purchase more character slots. This is the way to go if you want to try to save SG data. 
2. Next, log in to the forums here to use the Character Copy Tool. I'm not sure if it will let you register if you don't already have a login. I hope it does, but if not -- sorry, you're screwed. 
3. Transfer your remaining unlocked characters to the Beta Server. 
4. Download and install the Beta Server on your computer using the BCSoft Launcher. 
5. Please note how damn near everything on Beta Server costs you zero points. I'm not saying you should abuse this to get tons of free stuff just in case Plan Z works, but I won't ever know if you do, so...
6. At any rate, you can buy (for free) as many server slots as you want. Use these to unlock your transferred characters. 
7. Download the Extractor for Beta Server. 
8. Repeat the steps I listed earlier. 
9. If you have run out of room, you may delete the characters on Beta to free up the slots, and then transfer more characters for copying.
10. Make sure your character data is safely backed up. 

And that's it, so far as I know. I hope you find this helpful and informative. Until then...