I wanted to hear about some of your experience regarding the backup of your valuable Unreal Engine projects.
My scheme goes like this:
Main project on internal HDD.
Back-up 1 on same system but different physical HDD (two copies; one copied daily, and one copied weekly)
Back-up 2 on external shock resistant HDD
Back-up 3 on Google Drive
What do you think? Is it a good backup strategy? I am thinking of purchasing a 128 GB flash drive for additional backup. An optical disc option is not valid for me unless I get a blue ray drive. Folder sizes are beyond 20 GBs.
In addition, I have FreeFileSync installed. This is very handy when updating your backup copy. It will just add or modify any changes without having to copy the whole folder all over again. Also, it is very handy for example when I am experimenting with something and it goes wrong, then I easily sync back from the backup to the original folder. It’s like a revert option in Photoshop. Extremely handy!
Care to share your backup plans? I am interested in hearing about your ways of backing up your projects.
My project is not large enough to demand such a stringent backup strategy. I use git for source control in my main project, so every once in a while I just pull the repo into a clone on a different hdd. It is quick and easy, takes minimal space since only the changes are every copied.
At the start of the project I also figured out the steps I need to convert the setup to a server based git setup with gitolite, should I decide to form a team. In such a case every cloned repo could serve as a backup.
Ok if I am working alone and I just need archived copied of my project, would Dropbox be good for that? I am not actually interested in the features in Github or similar services. All what I am looking for is a safe cloud storage to upload my zipped project files once every week. What do you think?
You do not need to backup whole project folder, i think all you need is config, content and source folders (and files in root of project), rest will be automatically recreated.
I usually create zip file after each feature added, or when i can name what i just did: for eg.“particle effects for gun”. Then i create zip named “26_04_project_particle_effects_for_gun”.
This way files are sorted by date, and i easily can tell what is inside. Sometimes you change some code or asset and want to get it back some time later, naming helps.
Then i store all those zip files on different physical HDD in same PC, on external drive that is truecrypted (i know it is discontinued, but nobody without password can delete stuff there by mistake). One more copy is on my private, external HDD at work, and major versions of my projects are on google drive.
From a very young age, I come to realize that in many cases, the loss of a big chunks of your work can be a good thing. So, for my personal projects, local version control and a weekly backup. Sometimes not even that.
For other projects, well, version control + daily backups [at least 2 external HDD (which are kept in different buildings), plus one pen drive (which I carry with me at all times)] .
Thanks for sharing your ideas. I want to add that in my UE4 project folder, I actually save there all my assets other than those of UE, like a folder for 3ds max scenes, a folder for textures (before importing to UE), a folder for FBX exports, and many others.
Something else I wanted to mention, since my internet upload speed is not that fast, uploading a UE project takes nearly 24 hours, so my cloud backup is only weekly. For daily backups, I sync to a local folder on my HDD. If something bad happens, I simply reverse-sync to original folder. Takes only seconds.