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... :)

Indie Startups - How Do You Collaborate?

Working with others is hard. But being able to work remotely and have all your files merged together nicely is really cool. I'm talking about source-control/versioning software, a tool that lets you maintain history of the changes to your files, as well as allowing everyone on the team to merge their changes to the project seamlessly. There are a couple different versioning tools out there, but the one I'm most familiar with and enjoy using is Subversion.

Since my team has decided we might consider selling our Tower Defense game at some point, we finally decided to remove its open source label and get smarter about how we secure our project. So I decided to set up my laptop as a Subversion (SVN) server; I know I should really use a spare server but I don't have one lying around. So I installed SVN server, got the repository and permissions set up, configured my router to forward the SVN port to a static internal IP address, and... VOILA! I had a working SVN repository accessible via the internet.

Unfortunately my upload speed, which measured .96Mbps on speedtest.net, was providing an abysmal 120kBps download rate for my team members trying to update their working copy of the project -- and let's not even mention the 2+ hours spent on the initial checkout! By comparison, downloads from our open source provider were roughly 1500kBps. I was a little perplexed as to WHY my 1 meg-per-second upload rate was so slow until I saw this forum post, specifically the comment by JC316. Megabits are eight times smaller than Megabytes, and when I did the math I realized that 120kBps (120,000 * 8 = 960,000 bits) is the same as .96Mbps (.96 * 1,000,000).

The reality is that my upload speed is just too slow. We don't have an office to work out of yet and I don't want to shell out $100+ per month for internet service just for a better upload rate. We're considering other closed-source SVN hosting services for now, but I have to wonder...

As an indie startup with team members working remotely over the internet, how do YOU collaborate?