Back Up Your Joystick Gremlin, UCR and vJoy Profiles

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Ask a long-time vJoy user about their worst sim moment and it is rarely a crash in DCS. It is the Windows reinstall, the driver update, the new PC — followed by the discovery that forty hours of Joystick Gremlin curves, UCR mappings and per-game profiles are gone, and that rebuilding them from memory takes weeks of ‘why does this axis feel wrong?’ This guide is the boring, essential fix: know where your profiles live, back them up properly once, and never rebuild from scratch again. The tool we recommend for the job is pCloud, and we explain that choice — and its free tier — honestly at the end.

What exactly you stand to lose

• Joystick Gremlin profiles. Your per-game profile files hold merged-device layouts, axis curves, response tuning, macros and mode logic. This is usually the single most valuable file set in a vJoy user’s setup.
• UCR profiles. UCR stores its configuration — profiles, plugin setups and device mappings — in its own config data alongside the application. Losing it means re-teaching UCR every device and every remapping rule.
• vJoy device configuration. The number of vJoy devices and their axis/button counts, set through the Configure vJoy tool (vJoyConf), determines whether your Gremlin and UCR profiles load cleanly at all. Note your configuration before any reinstall.
• The sims’ own controller settings. DCS keeps per-aircraft input profiles in its Saved Games configuration; MSFS stores control profiles in its own settings and cloud sync, which has not always restored perfectly. A local copy is the version you control.

Where the profiles live — the honest version

Exact folders vary by version and by where you installed each tool, so treat any guide that prints one universal path with suspicion — including this one. The reliable method is: in each app, use its own save/export or open-file-location behaviour to find where your active profile file actually sits, and check the app’s profile and config folder next to the application itself for UCR. For DCS, look in your Saved Games folder’s DCS configuration for the input profiles. Write the paths you find into a note inside the backup itself; future-you, mid-reinstall, will be grateful. What matters is not memorising locations but having one verified copy of each app’s profile and config data, plus a screenshot of your vJoyConf device setup.

The backup workflow

• Step 1 — Gather. Create one folder, for example ‘Sim Profiles Backup’, and copy into it: your Gremlin profiles, UCR’s profile/config data, your DCS input configuration, and the vJoyConf screenshot and notes file.
• Step 2 — Date it and zip it. Rename the folder with the date, then compress it into a single archive. One archive is trivial to store, verify and restore, and the date stops ‘final-v2-REAL’ confusion.
• Step 3 — Put it somewhere that is not this PC. A cloud folder that syncs automatically, an external drive, or ideally both. The failure you are protecting against — reinstall, drive swap, dead SSD — takes every local-only copy with it.
• Step 4 — Refresh after big changes. Finished a new aircraft’s profile or rebuilt your HOSAS layout? Re-zip and re-upload. Thirty seconds now, or thirty hours later.
• Step 5 — Test the restore once. On a calm day, load a backed-up Gremlin profile and confirm your axes respond. A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a backup.

Why we point readers at pCloud for this

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The job has modest needs: automatic sync of a folder between your sim PC and the cloud, enough room for profile archives (they are small), and a restore experience that does not fight you. pCloud fits that job well, offers a free tier that is genuinely sufficient for profile and config backups of this size, and adds the option of lifetime plans for readers who dislike subscriptions — we are deliberately not quoting plan prices here, because they change and because the free tier covers the workflow in this guide. If you already use another cloud drive, use it: the recommendation that matters is the workflow above, not the logo. Where pCloud earns its place in this guide is that profile backup is a real, recurring need in this niche, and its sync client makes Steps 3 and 4 automatic once set up.

Restore order after a reinstall — do it in this sequence

Restoring in the right order saves a second round of troubleshooting. First, install vJoy itself from our download page and set your device count and axes in vJoyConf to match the screenshot in your backup — Gremlin and UCR profiles expect the same virtual devices they were built against. Second, install Joystick Gremlin and UCR, then copy your backed-up profile and config data into place before launching them for the first time, so the apps greet your old profiles rather than generating fresh defaults. Third, restore the sims’ own input configuration — for DCS, that is the input folder inside your Saved Games configuration — and only then launch each sim and confirm, device by device, that axes move the right surfaces. If a profile loads but an axis is dead, the cause is almost always a device-count mismatch from step one, not a corrupt backup.

One last discipline separates a backup from an archive: keep the last three dated versions, not just the newest. Profiles evolve as you add aircraft and re-tune curves, and the version from two months ago is sometimes the one that works after a tool update changes how a current profile loads. Storage is a non-issue — these archives are tiny — and the habit costs nothing. Combined with the way this site handles recommendations, it is the same principle applied to your own setup: boring, documented, and verified before you need it.

A final pairing note: the same backup habit protects the rest of your sim investment. The curves you tune after reading our first joystick guide, the twin-stick layout from the Star Citizen HOSAS guide and the tracking profiles from the head-tracking hub all live as files on the same PC as your Gremlin profiles — back them up together, and make sure vJoy itself is one quick visit to the download page away after any reinstall.