Is it possible for project file corruptions to propagate through revisions without detection?

I've been working on a project for several years and have been backing it up religiously. Yesterday, I was reading about experiences with corruption errors bricking entire projects; writeoffs, etc.

It got me thinking about the security of my project...Is project file corruption something that can silently migrate through revisions until the fateful day when a cascade failure unrecoverably bricks the whole project, with no path forward, since the corruptions go so far back into your repo?

 

Not really... the most you'd have to do is rebuild a scene if it gets corrupted. Merging YAML via source control is NEVER safe.

I suppose it is possible prefabs dragged out of that scene might get corrupted but I think you'd notice immediately.

Since you said "repo" I'll assume you're using source control, but JUST IN CASE, let me point this out:

Please consider using proper industrial-grade source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/prefab-links-keep-getting-dumped-on-git-pull.646600/#post-7142306

Here's how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/2-steps-backwards.965048/#post-6282497

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/whe...grammer-example-in-text.1048739/#post-6783740

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/your-techniques-to-share-code-between-projects.575959/#post-3835837

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/removing-il2cpp_cache-from-project.1084607/#post-6997067

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-git-with-unity

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place.

"Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later." - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards

 

Hi Kurt, Thanks so much for this. I'm glad to hear from an experienced Dev that my worries are more or less unfounded.
I do indeed use Git, and it works very well (for most things)

Best wishes.