• Hey Guest! Ever feel like entering a Game Jam, but the time limit is always too much pressure? We get it... You lead a hectic life and dedicating 3 whole days to make a game just doesn't work for you! So, why not enter the GMC SLOW JAM? Take your time! Kick back and make your game over 4 months! Interested? Then just click here!

An amazingly close call.....

Joe

Member
Nearly pooped on this one. Today, the hard drive that stores all of my project files finally crapped out (after ten years, not tea bag). I haven't backed up the project that I'm working on for nearly a year now (yea I know). But to my luck, GMS was still running with the project open that I'm working on. HOLY GOD, I just quickly saved it to backup. I know GMS does it's own kind of back up thing, but i've had bad luck with it in the past and always try to backup a source instead.

1 - Would anyone like to share a close call with a project they've had?
2 - Would anyone please share they're backup plans and contingencies?
 

RekNepZ

GMC Historian
I once accidentally left my headphones on while getting up and pulled my laptop off the desk where it crashed onto the hard floor of my dorm room destroying the hard drive. I'd love to say I'm more careful now about making backups, but I'm weirdly still much more careless than I should be.
 

Gamer (ex-Cantavanda)

〜Flower Prince〜
I'm not a gamedev, but a musician and composer. One time, my entire computer crashed, making me lose everything. But luckily, a few weeks earlier, I put everything on an external HDD. Phew.
 

Vusur

Member
Would anyone like to share a close call with a project they've had?
The story you only hear on the internet (ironic in this situation) or are as a prime example why backups are so important.

Be me, young and stupid. The middle of my bachelor thesis, not much time left. My old computer had its side open, so a lot of dust and other stuff accumulated over time. During an all nighter, my metal pen rolled of my desk, right into my computer and shorted the circuit. There was a small campfire inside. Poof, everything was gone. The 'fire' reached my Harddrive, so putting it into a different computer didn't work. Because time was short I payed a stupid amount of money for a good data recovery service. They good almost everything back. Only some side dokumentation was gone and the project files were messed up, but fixable. Unfortunaly, some vacation memories were lost forever.

Would anyone please share they're backup plans and contingencies?
This experience made me quite paranoid.
  1. For project related stuff: Github. It is a game changer, even if doing backup is secondary.
  2. For data, that I don't wanna put into a cloud -> RAID 1 system. It mirrors my data to different HDDs. Quite neat and simple to setup. If one HDD fails, the other one still has the data. If I delete something on my first (main) HDD, it's also deleted on the second HDD. So I don't pile up data garbage that I don't need anymore. It's not really a backup and only protects against some local HDD failures. If the system goes poof - like the fire, the data is still gone when all HDDs are affected.
  3. For data, that I can't recover when it goes poof, like photos, really important stuff from the RAID or memes (lol) -> 3 external HDDs. Hook them up, save them 3 times, and put them in different locations. Don't forget to replace those HDDs once in a while. I have one at home in a different room, one have my parents and one is at my bank. You see, doing backups this way is quite a task, so I do the backups between 6-12 months.
1 and 2 are for high access, 3 is a long term solution and also time consuming. If I lose data from 1 and 2, it would be bad af, but I can recover it. Just do the project again... Data for 3 can't be recreated. When you favorite photo of your dog is gone, it's gone forever.
Just keep in mind, there is no 100% protection against data loss. The Cloud server could blow up, your RAID could blow up and all three places, where you store the external HDD could blow up at the same time. Is it realistic? No. That's why we do backups in the first place.
 

kburkhart84

Firehammer Games
I'm the one with multiple backups. My gamedev stuff gets backed up to github cloud(for version control). Then it gets sent to a copy in my OneDrive(which is both local and cloud). Then it also sends it to a local(but external) hard drive.

1. Version Control
2. Two Clouds(one via github vcs, one OneDrive)
3. Two Local(one internal(in local OneDrive folder), one external)
 
Not game dev related, but still...

Short version. I was in this band and we were recording this album in a somewhat expensive studio. We were there for 10 full days, slept on the control room floor, eat, drank and shat Rock and Roll, going on full-blast and all-in.
All went well. Everybody was super stoked.

Couple days passed by... no news from the producer...which was weird, given the excitement of the whole thing...
So, I decide to ring him: "What's up, man!? Still stoked about those rocking sessions, huh?"
He goes "Bro...worst has happened... I lost it all...everything!"

HDD failure, lost our album master tracks, as well as MANY unfinished projects from paying customers and pro bands. We were small time, so we just went in there again and re-did it, but he did caught some big **** for it. I think his total bill for this lack of backup was about 10k$+ (just us was 10 "free" days @ 500$/day)...

This has been a long time ago (13-14 years, maybe), but to this day, everyone involved in this story STILL have a massive backup failure paranoia...this was a hard-learned lesson, to say the least...
 

RollyBug

Member
I'm the one with multiple backups. My gamedev stuff gets backed up to github cloud(for version control). Then it gets sent to a copy in my OneDrive(which is both local and cloud). Then it also sends it to a local(but external) hard drive.

1. Version Control
2. Two Clouds(one via github vcs, one OneDrive)
3. Two Local(one internal(in local OneDrive folder), one external)
This is exactly what I do. Though I go a little further by having a big Google Drive space that my desktop is synced to, and then MultCloud mirrors the important bits to my free accounts on Mega, OneDrive, Dropbox, and pCloud. It works quite well.
 

chamaeleon

Member
My backups are source control, onedrive, and a backup program backing up my top level projects working directories and git repositories (and other things too of course) to another local drive and to another computer on a regular basis (currently daily).
 
Top