Do You Back Up Your Work?!!

[elend]

Always back up on several media (USB, Harddrives, Cloud) as well as different locations (your work place, cloud, whatever possible). We had a neat backup solution in my former work's basement. Yeah guess what, it was flooded one day, lulz. Luckily we additionally had this online solution, where you pay a fee and it uploads new files automatically and daily to a server in the switzerland mountains somewhere, hehe. Even though, I would never totally rely on cloud services only. Guess what, one day they'll be just gone. Or their servers flooded. :p

[xvertigox]

I'm surprised that some people don't have cloud backups of their WIP projects. Google gives you 15gb cloud storage for free and you can have your WIP folder(s) sync whenever a change is made. It's so easy to set up and gives you an offsite backup. Flash drives / external HDDs are good and all but you need offsite backups.

[Tango]

3 hours ago, Doom Marine said:

Not sure how everybody does versioning of their WADs, but I increment my save name by one everytime I do it. So DVII-SE has roughly 2800 saves since the First Edition's release. 

 

hot damn this sounds like a huge amount of work. I'm not sure how best you'd reconcile it with your dropbox usage, but this seems like exactly the kind of thing that git would be most useful for.

 

come to think of it, since you're already doing remote backups with dropbox, you could just use git exclusively "locally" - with no remote pushing to GitHub or GitLab or something - and make sure your .git folder is part of the dropbox upload. I think you could end up saving yourself a good bit of work doing things this way. but if you're not already familiar with git, then maybe it's more trouble than it would be worth D:

[Endless]

Not Doom related but I like writing, and I write dialy, up to the point that I still have short tales and poems from 6 years ago, and theres quite a lot of stuff that I like in those folders. One day, my main pc, a shitty laptop, died. The harddrive game a blue error and there was no way to save all the stuff I had. Lucky me, I had a USB with some stuff, but it was severely outdated and missing lots of stuff. Funny enough, I share all my writings through messenger with my best friend, so my solution was finding each one of those messages and re-creating my stuff. It was tedious and took a lot of time, but I got done, and now, I backup everything in a USB once per week, but most importantly, I have all my important documents in OneDrive and some in Mediafire.

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

Whatever map that I work on, I upload it to Google Drive in an event that the file is corrupt or lost.

[noisebloom]

21 hours ago, Jon said:

Thank you for this PSA on the importance of backups. I love backups. I also love git. But I must point out, git is not backup.

 

In and of itself, it isn't, but any Git cloud service like Azure, Bitbucket, Gitlab, etc. functionally serves as a backup, no? You essentially now have two mirrored repos instead of one.

[Doom Marine]

23 hours ago, Tango said:

 

hot damn this sounds like a huge amount of work. I'm not sure how best you'd reconcile it with your dropbox usage, but this seems like exactly the kind of thing that git would be most useful for.

 

come to think of it, since you're already doing remote backups with dropbox, you could just use git exclusively "locally" - with no remote pushing to GitHub or GitLab or something - and make sure your .git folder is part of the dropbox upload. I think you could end up saving yourself a good bit of work doing things this way. but if you're not already familiar with git, then maybe it's more trouble than it would be worth D:

 

I used Git back when I was an Infosec Engineer. It's been two years since I called my two weeks (and also my last line of code written), and it's going to take me a few hours to reconfigure and refind my wherewithal to get back into Git.

 

I may be missing something here, but isn't Git when I used to code, best for versioning and documenting changes? I don't think either of those things are an issue with how I build my project, which just requires a current-state backup plus several past versions incase I fuck up the current one. Maybe I'm just lazy and finding excuses to not relearn new things =p

[Tango]

1 hour ago, Doom Marine said:

best for versioning and documenting changes?

 

right, but isn't that basically what you're doing right now? maybe I misinterpreted. it sounds like what you're doing is this:

 

• every time you make a new change, you save a new version, with a new integer-incremented filename

 

this gives you the benefit of nice history you can easily go back and look at, and you never lose any significant revisions. but with git, it would instead be:

• every time you make a new change, you do a git commit with a brief message about what changed (if desired). no new filenames or manual Save As, just a commit every however often you feel like it

so now you don't have all the new files (and all the space they take up), and you still maintain the benefit of being able to easily traverse your history via git's checkout, AND if you have descriptive commit messages, you can more easily jump between specific commits in history if you're looking for something in particular. eg if you're trying to go back till right before you overhauled map05, then scroll through your commit logs till you see your commit titled "overhauled map05", and now you know what revision to check out.

 

but yeah, if your current system is working for you, I can very much understand not wanting to try digging into git. it can be a hassle when you're not on the happy path with it

 

[Jon]

15 hours ago, noisebloom said:

 

In and of itself, it isn't, but any Git cloud service like Azure, Bitbucket, Gitlab, etc. functionally serves as a backup, no? You essentially now have two mirrored repos instead of one.

No. You can use git for backup, just like if I’m feeling lazy I can cut fruit with a spoon, but that’s not what it’s for. You have to explicitly decide what to backup and make sure you push all branches to your remotes regularly. It doesn’t track metadata like time stamps. It doesn’t manage expunging old data, so it’s not good for backup rotations, the repository size will always grow until it’s unmanageable. And lots of other details. 
 

 For someone unfamiliar with git and not practising backups, it would be a bad idea to try and address that with git, instead of a proper backup system.  

[Doom_Dude]

On 6/17/2020 at 9:59 AM, Phobus said:

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, using DEU, I was plagued with hours of work disappearing in a nodebuilder crash whilst saving, so I learned the value of backups young in life.

 

That reminds me. I don't remember losing anything substantial when I used DoomCad, even when it did bug out. The one editor that destroyed my work was Qoole, when I was creating HeXen 2 maps. It was the first and only editor I had paid for ($20 Canadian at a Chapters store). It ate an entire map one day and I had no backup so it was completely gone. Hard way to learn to be more diligent in keeping stuff backed up.

[RonLivingston]

That is one of the important things i need to do