> Project Zomboid was regularly backed up from machine to machine, but rarely – sadly and infuriatingly – externally. We have lost an awful lot of work.
I don't want to be an arsehole, but COME ON. Really? No proper backup?
I don't want to be an arsehole, but COME ON. Really? No proper backup?
It shouldn't happen, and for the people responsible for the loss of this data, it never should have. Again though, it's easy to see how caffeine induced coding sessions end up with tons of code and not much else. Those tons of code are PRODUCT, and they're building it. The idea of burglary sounds so far-fetched that it's always easy to put off til tomorrow. And backups took _time_, and _effort_. Time and effort that would have taken away from coding. From building.
Nowadays though, between Github, Dropbox, or any of the million completely painless ways to back up your code, it seems even more egregious that something like this can happen.
Admittedly, I use Dropbox as a convenience more than anything. So that I know a core set of files are available to me no matter what computer I'm on, but it was very natural to fall into the habit of making sure that 'important' documents went in there as well.
If I had to throw this laptop out the window and never see it again, I'd feel relatively assured that between Dropbox and Chrome, I wouldn't lose anything important. I've had a couple of hard drives crash recently, and short of having had to take the time to reinstall some apps that might have been slow downloads, that's about all there was to it.
I can't fathom developers not having backups. Hell, I back everything up to SpiderOak and then to my RAIDed NAS at home which, again, goes to SpiderOak and S3. It's not that I'm paranoid, it's just that they're so easy to set up and cheap to run that I just left them there when the new thing came.
Edit: I just re-read what I posted in this comment, and I think I was unclear. Just stating that my initial response was in agreement with yours, though that might have been easy to miss if you were skimming.
It's just that making backups is kind of useless if you don't store them in a separate physical location. For just about every scenario in which you'd conceivably need a backup, except for "oops I accidentally did `rm / -rf`", they might as well have backed it up to `/dev/null` and save themselves some diskspace.
That said, I know how much this sucks (actually not because I've always made proper backups, but let's say I can imagine), I'm saying this more as a warning to everybody else who might be reading this, not to bash them over their heads about their mistake.
They got burgled, FFS, I feel for those poor fellows, that really sucks.
Yes. For the avoidance of all doubt (and I thought it went without saying) I feel sorry for them too; being robbed is really rough and losing a bunch of work because of it is also really rough.
And insurance is such a scam that I'd be curious to know if they get any money or if their insurance refuses to pay out.
Why was it not in an externally hosted repository?
A bunch of friends and I wrote a rather simple game in Unity3D and our repos went to become more than 2GB.
It is not the code which isn't usually that large but you have to consider the assets, especially images (3D models usually aren't that bad, but they can still run up in a couple of MB), sound and (if you are unlucky) uncompressed video.
At too it that the binary assets can't really be stored in a version control system except as snapshots and you can see the problem.
And you often have more than one change at a time.
As for two gigabytes not being much I don't think their repos is that small. Most of us would properly have no issue downloading it, but you have to upload them (and DSL isn't symetric) and you have to find some place that is willing to host those gigantic repositories.
Use git-submodule for your sounds and videos and other binary blobs.
Unity makes their own asset server for people who aren't comfortable with git or svn -- there's plenty of debate on the quality of this option, and it's more money, but it's definitely cheaper than losing your entire game.
Or use an external HD, which are a bit faster and also bigger.
Though SD cards are nearly indestructible, you can drop em or drive your car over them, the one in my camera even survived my house burning down, so yeah.