Wednesday, October 9, 2013

What's YOUR backup strategy?

Recently, I was working on my afore-mentioned forthcoming Android game. I currently use Subversion, coupled with TortoiseSVN, locally on my development laptop for change management. So if I get to a solid point where I'm happy with my changes, I can commit them to my local repository. Then if I later try something new and don't like my latest work I can just revert back to the last "golden" build.

But there is a certain danger in this development flow. As I mentioned, I'm using Subversion locally on my development laptop. And every now and then, I get a sneaking suspicion that my laptop is just waiting to die on me right before I commit a large chunk of code with the most amazing changes I've ever made! So what is a poor indie game developer to do?

In the past, collaborating with a team on a small PC game, my team used a commercial hosting plan. So our code was committed to a remote repository and that worked as our off-site backup. But for my small Android game, I didn't really want to pay for hosting OR use an open-source repository. So I've actually been using the much lower-tech method of zipping up my code folder and storing occasional backups on DropBox or my Google Drive. That gets the job done; I just worry I may not be doing that frequently enough, and like I said the laptop could choose to give up on any given day. One thing I've learned over the years is "Save early, Save often." and to not trust hardware, because it will let you down when you least expect it.

So what's YOUR backup strategy? Leave a comment to let me know! But excuse me... I need to go, uh... make another backup... :)

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