BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!

Quote from: DJ_O on 12 November, 2011, 20:43:35

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Also it's always good to backup outside your home too. Imagine you got backups on CDs, flash drive, computers, calculators, but then a tornado or hurricane tear everything apart?

These days, I happen to keep a running backup of the very important projects like E:SoR and CaDan on an off-site FTP account. The primary purpose, admittedly, was to share source material with geekboy in a somewhat primitive manner, but it serves its righteous purpose as an off-site backup as well. And can also serve as a possible place to make a site for CaDan, but geekboy is the guy who's doing that job.

No matter how many local backups you make of your stuff, you can end up losing it all in a natural disaster. Since stuff like that happens rather rarely (areas where it's common do not apply unless your place isn't hardened against stuff like that. Example: Earthquakes in California), you don't think it could happen to you, but it could happen, and you will be thankful that not everything that tied you to this world was where your local stuff was at. I've got to worry about a tsunami wiping everything out, and if I happen to survive, first thing's first. Make sure my friends and family are alive (sorry guys). Second thing for me is to figure out how to get into contact with the community and tell everyone I'm just fine. People here on Omnimaga actually care about your well-being, which also makes this place one of the best communities out there. Is this a revelation for some? We do actually stick together and we worry about people when bad stuff happen.

Point is, once you get back on your feet and feel like you're ready to code again, you're gonna wish you had a reliable backup other than what you had at ground-zero. More power to you if you happen to have extremely damage-resilient flash drives, or indestructible CD/DVD's, or perhaps your information was stored on a Toughbook®. Maybe you had none of these and you're just SoL. Nobody wants to be there.

Although not feasible for most people, having a group of people working on your project, especially a group whose geographic locations are wildly varied, can help protect your project, since you're likely going to distribute source among your trusted online and/or IRL friends. Having multiple backups everywhere is simply a side-effect of the group effort that's happening with your project.

Even if you had local backups, do you make sure that your backup device is not connected to any source of power or plugged into anything that has a source of power? What happens if lightning strikes and your "backup" flashdrive is still connected to your computer even though you aren't using it at the moment? What happens if you had an SD card in your computer at the time? An external hard drive? Forget about your internal hard drive, that's fried. The answer is that everything is fried, and possibly your CD inside your CD/DVD-ROM drive too if you get a hard enough jolt (though if that happens, you've probably got more to worry about than your data...)

And, finally, what happens if the worst were to occur? Some terrorist builds and lets off an EMP and destroys all your (along with everyone else's) electronics? Sure, you're gonna have more to worry about than your data, but still. I actually happen to have flash drives inside a tin (which *should* shield against that sort of thing) for that very purpose. Call me paranoid, but I like to have data intact, and I'm sure you do too. Plus, you're not going to lose those flash drives if they're in something large enough to be seen in the room, so you get that benefit. I mean, what good is a backup if you can't even find it?

tl;dr: Have convenient off-site backups in multiple geographic locations. Make your on-site backups disaster-resistant. Just in case the world ends. If you're paranoid, choose the four corners of the world as your backup sites. And your bank's safe-deposit box.