Important Reminder: Backup Your Files!

[Ace of Spades]

This is a public service announcement. As spring rolls around, you may be thinking of releasing that game demo you've been working on all winter long. But what if something horrible were to happen to your computer at this instant? Do you have a backup file of your project in a safe location? (i.e. a location that isn't on your hard drive)

My main reason for posting this is to raise awareness of the importance of backing up your files. I had a computer virus two days ago and nearly lost 5-6 months of work on my game project Odyssey. Basically it would have been devastating enough to make me consider dropping the project and starting a new one. Luckily I managed to salvage my game file to a flash drive before doing a complete system restore. It could have been a lot worse, but I lucked out.

How often do you backup your project? Is it often enough that if you lost all progress you've made since your last backup that you'd be able to replicate the work you've done? If no, I recommend taking the couple minutes to make sure a copy gets safely put somewhere, whether it's on a flash drive or sent to your e-mail. Have any horror stories or close calls about losing your game? Feel free to vote in the poll and discuss!

 

[Eventing_Guy]

It could have been a lot worse, but I lucked out.

I wish I was a little luckier...

I was doing a sort of sytem restore too... I backed up my file.

I wasn't that far into my game, Script searching... Most of which can be found online anyway.

2 gigs of the reasourses I had... Demos, Character edits I've made, ect.

So when I went to restore it, I realised it was corrupted. uch:

 

[Pokémaniac]

My option isn't even there; "Every day"(well, every day I've been working on it). I-I lost a (crappy) RM project when I was 10 because my mum was cleaning up the desktop. N-never again!

(Now if only I could get into this routine with my school stuff on my shitty school laptop that has wiped itself SIX GODDAMNED TIMES in the 9-or-so months that I've had it. It's just doing anything with that laptop is painful and there's really no convenient time to back it up but excuses~)

 

[gerrtunk]

Backup via mail. Send it to gmail, accepts to 20mb.

Normally i do backups everyday, or at least, everyday i do interesting things.

But i have still to do the online backup completely, because its 700mb long. So, im writing my own script to do that.

 

[Ellie]

I'm guilty of not backing up often enough. Nowadays my game is online though so I have always got two copies (the actual online form and the files I uploaded still on my computer) at all times. I backup those files also though when I remember.

 

[Juan J. Sánchez]

You know, the other day I lost my USB flash drive, which had my Java projects and some Medina Stories files. It was depressing. Thankfully, I have backups. But I did lose a shit load of sprites. What I'm trying to say is backup your backups.

 

[BlueScope]

I never back up my projects... I have a seperate HDD for data-only media, meaning nothing that will likely get corrupted beyond repair even if hell breaks loose on my OS.
Now you could argue that I mainly do scripts, and as I release a slight amount of them, they're "backed up". That, however is even too small to express it with per cent values, so... not really counting.

Also, not only does the poll miss 'every day', but it also misses 'instantly' - think raid mirrors (and yes, people have them at home).

 

[Kingdom Ablaze]

i backup my project before i open it everyday, ya i got tons of wasted space, but i also have a very good history of everything i work on

 

[Ellie]

I backup everything now. It's hard not to when all your files are duplicated when you upload them anyway, but I do it out of habit now since I've lost a few files that way. I do have a habit of opening text files instead of finding notepad though... Saved over a few scripts that way. Bloody 1-level ctrl-z. With bigger files though it can get a bit tedious. Even if nowadays space is free, it still takes time to copy and move those files and whatnot. At one point my RM project was a gigabyte in size, I certainly didn't back that up every time. Granted I probably could/should have gone through and deleted all the shit I didn't need.

It is cool though going through old revisions and seeing where you did what. It can help get back to the original plot/story too, if you go back to older revisions.