What do you use to backup your projects?

Currently every day I just copy the project folder in to another folder called backups.

I did use automator on the mac but to be honest, I found it quicker to just copy the folder as I work on a few different projects and didn't want to set daily backups for all my projects that I might not be working on for a while.

So, what do you guys use?

 

GitHub with the SmartGit client.

 

Does Github store all files? I thought it was just for code?

 

GIT stores all files.

You can use either SVN or GIT or HG.

 

Copy - paste. Reminds me every time how bloated the project folder is.

 

Time machine works good for me.

 

I use Time Machine and Crash Plan (off site) together. If my Time Machine drive fails or my computer explodes (from all the awesome games I'm making) I will always have a backup on the Crash Plan drives. I got the family plan so my wife's computer is backed up as well.

 

That's not actually a backup and won't do much good when the drive dies. Use Time Machine with another drive. I also do external backups occasionally, for those explody situations that Crazy Robot mentioned.

--Eric

 

I use Time Machine. My Macbook Pro has dual HDD's and an external. So I use the external to backup both and it all works out just fine.

 

This , dropbox works for me

 

Stores it all. And, you can have a custom I/O site for people to land at (For instance, for my project, my github repository is here, but people can land on my custom I/O site here.)

 

I do the copy paste every day, mostly just in case I screw up my own code or corrupt the file somehow.

otherwise,.I use Drop Box, and also copy my files to my work computer( which I know gets backedUp),..and if I remember, or hit a milestone,..I will upload the project to my own website in a backup folder there.

 

Like many others, I just do the copy paste to another hard drive. I'm running 2 extra 1TB 7200RPM hard drives with my projects cloned onto both. My main project storage is a Toshiba 18GB SSD. I've come into quite a bit of spending money so i might just buy myself a small NAS for even more backup lol.

 

GitHub can store anything you want.
There is even a premade Unity ignore file that you put in your root folder, which ignores files that don't need to be checked in, (such as the Library and Obj) folders etc... It is a text file, so you can see what is included and what isn't. It's really easy.

SmartGit is a great Git client. Nice and visual and you don't need to do any funky command line stuff.
But a Git basic course is recommended to at least know what you are doing. Pluralsight.com has a great course on GIT.

As SuperPig says Make sure your project is set to store META files.

 

The problem with this method is what happens if you go out to the store and you come back and your house has blown up? There goes all your hard work...

Having an offsite repository such as GitHub gives you a remote backup location, and when you do a file commit each time you complete a task, your project or an individual file can be recovered back to the state it was in before you completed that task (or any previous task)

Another problem with the 'daily' backup copy, is if a file or prefab gets corrupted and you don't know about it. Then you go and make your backup, overwrite your good backup with a corrupted prefab, then a week later discover it's corrupted, and now you're in a spot of the brown stuff.

Once a week I zip the full project folder up and copy to SkyDrive and keep it there, but this is only as a 3rd/last resort option just in case.

With a source repository you can simply revert to the last changed version of that file and get the non-corrupted version, without affecting anything else in your project.

Seriously, doing daily folder copies or backups is an archaic, inefficient and unreliable way to do things.
Get better!

 

CrashPlan. Automated, off-site, and saves versions.

 

git + dropbox solution (because it is free, but works great)

 

I use Time Capsule, but for lowcost and reasonably long term storage i was thinking about SSD, Usb keys or Sd cards with certified 100.000 cycles ( MLC chips ) because they should have a better MTBF than hard disk if connected only during the backup.

This could be a good choice but it's expansive in my opinion:

http://www.sandisk.it/products/usb/memory-vault/

Dropbox or similar cloud are interesting solutions while i do not consider Tape for the cost.

 

+1 for DropBox, has done the job for me

 

Time machine with critical builds and assets being sent to dropbox once a month. I'd like to do it more frequently but my usage cap doesn't allow it.

 

my projects are git repositories, and then those along with all my computers files go to a backup in a external drive made by time machine, from time to time i clone the time machine backup to another drive, the backup is uncompressed and unencrypted so i can pick up files myself in finder without the need to enter the time machine

 

Google Drive is beawtifal. Swapped over from Dropbox.

Docs is worth it on it's own.

 

- I always keep several states of a project on several disks.

- I use hourly TimeMachine backups

- I've used dropbox for save important things on an encrypted sparse bundle image (this way it does not have to upload the whole image each time you change something).

But I just switched to "Copy" which is similar to Dropbox and as good and as easy to use.
It just offers much more space ("Copy" starts at free space of 15GB and gives another 5GB for each referral, I've got 45GB for free on the first day! Now I have almost enough to make backups of all important projects)

If you follow this link to register you (and me) will get additional 5GB https://copy.com?r=dWYhG6

 

This used to be great until I discovered www.trello.com
It's a great visual web-based tool that lets you add lists and draggable cards/tasks to lists and you can comment/add attachments to those cards. Seriously, check it out, you won't go back.

 

SVN

 

JustCloud
I have over 1/2 TB backed up there and can run the backup function to backup any changed files,
either manually or automatically.

 

WinRar

 

I'll just copy paste if i'm working on something that is not important.

If it's important, I'm using SVN.

Unlike some folks, I'm a little ultra paranoid about my source code/assets - so my approach is to use VMWare ESXi to spool up a 'dev' box. That box is put behind a router/fw an only accessible via LAN and I'm using VisualSVN for my svn server (very clean and easy to setup, used to go with linux but apache/svn config still gives me nightmares, what a pita). After that you just use tortiosesvn or your faviourite svn client to connect and you'll see nice fast LAN speeds so for folks like myself out in the country network delays are a non issue.

The ESXi approach works great for me in other ways - I'm running another 'pub-dev' box where JIRA is installed, have some work to outsource? Create a JIRA(s) to spec it out and track the work, create your own bugs/tasks for some baby-PM'ing and get automated builds, fisheye, etc... all in place. Even for a one man shop this is helpful as i'll outsource things like art assets or tasks that are outside my expertise.

Tossed 4TB of drives in ESXi, so space is a non issue .

Good luck!

 

I use a NAS for time machines backups and take snapshots of my dev tree once in awhile but like others have mentioned that is very dangerous without a cloud service to back it up offsite as well. Currently shopping around for an affordable cloud backup service that supports multiple computers, large amount of data, and linux/osx/win. Trying crashplan+ at the moment but it has been running for days so far just to do the initial backup of my mac, not too excited about that.

Oh yea, and git repository lives on the nas.

 

JustCloud ran for about 5 1/2 days to back up my 1/2 TB of data, even with the add upgrade to "Supercharged Backups".
Once it's all backed up the changed files backups take around 20 minutes.

 

I use a svn repository at assembla. The free version is 500mb and up to 3 users. The reason why I picked assembla is that the free version supports private projects, so other people can't see it, which is important for me. It's also faster than other free svn providers for me (I tested projectlocker, codeplex, sourceforge).

 

I just started using Mercurial and bitbucket on all 3 of my dev machines and it's been wonderful to have everything all in sync. I highly recommend it.

 

Honestly.. I do exactly what you do and copy/paste... I'm not sure I would trust an automated back up thingamajig of any kind with this much work...

 

Generally, Time Machine for safety net. For version control, I have have Linux box on my home network running as file server and svn repo. So SVN for that. Though I really should do so more often, I do an off-site back up about once a month.

 

We use an SVN repository hosted on our own local Linux server. It works pretty well for the most part. We also do manual offsite backups periodically.

 

Why not just backup to an off-site repository service like BitBucket or GitHub? If your house blows up on day 29 of that backup that's a lot of work up in smoke.

 

I just have my Unity Projects in my dropbox folder. Usually I try to keep each project below about 50Mb. There only small games.

It gives me peace of mind because I know if I lose my laptop there still going to be there.

 

i use smile2cloud for all of my Online storage backup needs.

 

We use a Git repository on Assembla (which also provides our ticketing and project management). I'd definitely recommend a distributed source control system (Git or Mercurial), as there's as much value in the change history on a complex project as there is in the current build.

 

I'm also a Git user, I have a repository for my current project up on GitHub for the time being. For a larger studio, there would be more value in having a private repository that only members of your team can see, but so far it's worked out great for my project.

 

When we had good upload speed:

Dropbox on all computers

Now we don't have good upload:

RSync to server every night
Dropbox on server