Author Topic: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!  (Read 90373 times)

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Offline Iambian

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #75 on: November 13, 2011, 02:24:05 am »
[...]
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.
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Offline C0deH4cker

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #76 on: November 13, 2011, 10:02:26 pm »
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?

If that were to happen, then youd have a lot more to worry about than a calc game you were working on. :P

Offline epic7

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #77 on: November 13, 2011, 10:06:28 pm »
New England rarely has natural disasters. Well, there was Irene, but still... :P
I still keep a backup in dropbox

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #78 on: December 27, 2011, 02:20:08 am »
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?

If that were to happen, then youd have a lot more to worry about than a calc game you were working on. :P
It depends. For some people the latter is much more important. O.O (Although in some cases, if someone loses 2 years of hard work on something that is hardly re-creatable it can hurt so much that only losing a close person could be worse for him)
« Last Edit: December 27, 2011, 02:20:59 am by DJ_O »

Offline Sorunome

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #79 on: December 27, 2011, 03:54:29 pm »
I once lost the scrolling part of my rpg, luckily I could recreate it, since then I ALWAYS back up my progress.

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Offline parserp

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #80 on: December 27, 2011, 04:53:31 pm »
I once got a ROM clear, but only because my brother was being stupid :P

I lost most everything :(

Offline Aes_Sedia5

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #81 on: December 28, 2011, 01:39:07 am »
I personally keep everything in many places. To me everytging in my house is replaceable(except life of course) except my programs. So i keep everything on drop box.



Offline Sorunome

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #82 on: December 28, 2011, 05:25:45 am »
So...you have like two beds? O.o

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Offline Blue Raven

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #83 on: December 28, 2011, 06:25:49 pm »
So...you have like two beds? O.o
Yeah, and he has a third one on DropBox in case of alien attack.
In my case, backing up everithing in the calc data wasn't enough when I lost my calc. :S
I should save the stuff on my computer but i'm too lazy.
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Offline annoyingcalc

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #84 on: December 28, 2011, 06:54:47 pm »
I once got a ROM clear, but only because my brother was being stupid :P

I lost most everything :(
I once had that happen for the same reason too but I recovered it with the archive undelete program
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Offline Aes_Sedia5

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #85 on: December 28, 2011, 08:24:10 pm »
No i mean with money i can replace everything. Programs cant be bought back and all the hard work is lost. And not that is matters, but yes i have 2 beds , one is in storage.
« Last Edit: December 28, 2011, 08:25:17 pm by Aes_Sedia5 »



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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #86 on: December 28, 2011, 08:50:10 pm »
i program 84 basic on the Nspire emulater, and once when it crashed the cursor was offset like a quarter of an inch into the screen
i had to turn it off to fix it. it was a good thing that i had archived my programs.
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Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #87 on: December 29, 2011, 03:15:31 am »
I lost most everything :(
* DJ_O lost the game from reading this x.x

And well said Aes_Sedia5 (welcome to the forums by the way). Sometimes people claim if you lose an entire game it's not the end of the world, but when someone devoted 100 hours of work into something and it came from his inspiration that he had to get out as soon as possible before losing his ideas, it sucks when everything gets deleted. This is why Illusiat 4 is not available online. I lost all 4 games during the Illusiat 2002 crash, but the graphics in Illusiat 4 were just un-recreatable, unlike the three previous games, so as a result the first 3 games were re-created, but not the first. Your motivation takes a huge hit after losing a lot of progress too.

Offline Aes_Sedia5

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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #88 on: December 29, 2011, 04:04:33 am »
I can imagine. That would suck to lose everything

Also, darn you DJ_O you made me lose



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Re: BACKUP YOUR PROGRESS OFTEN!
« Reply #89 on: December 31, 2011, 02:50:24 pm »
The worst part however was really the loss of Illusiat 2002, because I had spent 2 months on it, 10 hours a day for an entire week once due to chicken pox and about 5-6 for the others, only to see the 79 KB large RPG (split into chapters) disappear through a MirageOS crash.