mt5 auto-updated overnight and broke my EA, how do i lock the build

[endlessroad]

woke up to my EA throwing errors that werent there yesterday. turns out the terminal auto-updated to a new build and something in the trade functions changed behaviour. spent the morning patching instead of trading.

is there a clean way to freeze the mt5 build so it stops updating itself without my permission? id rather test new builds on a separate install when i choose to.

[carterw]

you cant fully block mt5 updates from inside the terminal, the broker pushes the build. but you can blunt it: run the terminal portable mode with the /portable flag, keep a zipped copy of the exact working build folder, and if an update breaks you restore the folder in 30 seconds. i keep a known-good snapshot of every terminal i run live.

[Oliver]

portable mode plus a backup folder is the real answer. also worth running your live EA on a dedicated terminal install that you never touch for browsing the market or testing, so theres less reason for it to update at an inconvenient time.

[frostbyte]

or write EAs that dont break on a point release. if a minor build update kills your bot your error handling was already broken, the update just exposed it. fix the actual fragility instead of freezing yourself on an old build forever.

[Ryan]

the troll is rude but not wrong. that said, builds have genuinely changed trade function return codes before in ways no error handling could predict. the pragmatic move is both: defensive code AND a restorable snapshot. i test every new build on a demo terminal for a week before letting it near a live account.

[quietstorm]

how do you even take a snapshot, is it just copying the whole mt5 folder somewhere safe?

[nightwalker]

yes basically. with portable mode the terminal keeps everything in its own folder, so you zip that folder while the terminal is closed and you have a complete restore point including your EAs, settings and logins. label it with the build number so you know what youre rolling back to.