Keeping previous project files

LatteIsHorse

Hi all,

It might sound like a stupid question, but do you keep all the previous project files from a to z?

I usually create files from Photoshop, 3ds max, maya, substance painter and ue4.

It seems excessive to keep all the files but at the same time it doesn't, so I don't really know what to do with all the files.

Any suggestions of the ways of storing the files?

Thanks!

EarthQuake

Dropbox or Google Drive are good options. Depending on how important the files are to you, it's good to have a redundant backup as well. The usual advice is three copies, two local, and one remote.

So I have the files on my local computer, my NAS - network-attached storage, basically a simple computer with big hard drives, and a remote copy on either Dropbox or Google drive. I reserve a section of the NAS for stuff I don't think I'm going to need but want to keep just in case, that lives on the NAS and is mirrored to a (very inexpensive) Amazon Glacier instance. The NAS has software to synchronize.

Working out of Dropbox for art can be really useful, it stores 30 days of file history (deleted files, revisions) so if you accidentally delete or save over something, it's easy to get it back.

Axi5

I was moving my files into the cloud earlier this week and realised that some assets, very simple assets mind you, had upwards of 8GBs of source files associated with them.

My idea was this: If it's finished or I'm never going to touch it again then just keep the final output.

My folders included bakes, substance files, substance archives, DDO files, PSDs, various test FBXs, exploded FBXs and much more. I condensed most of it down to:
* A Blend or Toolbag file -- Setup to preview the final asset -- Possibly with High Poly hidden in the scene
* Low Poly FBX
* Textures folder containing Final Textures
* A ".preview" folder that contains renders

Any assets that I had rendered out in Unreal/Cryengine/Unity were promptly brought back into Blender/Toolbag and the game engine files were deleted which cut down several GB. I'll only keep these if there's a full project in the works here, and not just a few assets being shown off in-engine.

In my case "Finished or never going to touch again" was works I hadn't even looked at in over 5 years, let alone had plans on finishing. Going forward I'm going to use cloud storage as a non-robust version control & pay a bit of attention to keeping the bare minimum. I'll inevitably have to clean this all up at a later date anyway but it doesn't hurt to spend some time organising.

In the end I managed to fit all my files into ~4GB altogether.

Of course it's basically up to you but in my case I was pretty brutal with the amount of stuff I deleted.

thomasp

I don't keep all revisions of my work files when an asset is done - just the major steps and in case of commercial work my original version, the feedback(s) I implemented and the final scene. No raw bake data is being kept just the source files to reexport from in case its needed.

My work volume for current projects is a 1TB SSD that gets mirrored to a folder on a 2 TB SSD which also contains archived projects and reference. All that gets mirrored onto a 3 TB hard drive which additionally contains temp files.

The mirroring isn't performed automatically but rather triggered manually. So one press of a button gets me three copies of my work stored on the machine on three different physical drives.

In addition I have an external disk connected to which everything but temp files get mirrored. And every few days I connect another, identical external hard drive and do a full mirror from one to another.

There's also rather infrequent BluRay backups, usually when a project is wrapped up.

I also regularly clone and rotate my system drive (I have two identical SSDs mounted, only one of them is connected at any time except for disk cloning sessions): I had my OS fail me once right before a milestone, spent the weekend setting it up again and finishing the job. Never again...

rollin

I currently use a hdd raid which I backup to another hdd raid and I keep pretty much everything. Though to-bake exports of high and lowpoly are not backed up. 
And then I have two more drives where I store everything again as backups of the backup. 
So pretty much all everywhere and if drives get too small I buy bigger ones. 
I don't store anything in the internets. I don't trust the internets.

And @thomasp my system partition is now on an external ssd-raid from where I boot. 

I also have a bunch of m2-ssd usb-"sticks" for various things.
The only normal hdd drive I keep is the one for games.

thomasp

rollin said:

And @thomasp my system partition is now on an external ssd-raid from where I boot. 

So is the Raid a straight mirror and/or is it also a setup to increase performance? And what happens in your case if something goes wrong with the Windows-installation (driver, registry, failed update - whatever) - do you somehow keep a working copy regardless?

That's the one I am afraid of: only OS I have managed to break over the years - sometimes with a mistake on my part, sometimes puzzling software fuckup.

rollin

Hmm .. maybe I had luck but my last OS from 2011 (which I had to abundant bc of pc > laptop switch) still works quite nice. As I now boot from an external drive (boi this was hard to set up thx to windows being an idiot) I have the internal OS as a backup if necessary.
Though I have started to use virtual machines a lot for most untrusted software and portable version of software where possible which do not affect the OS installation. So my main OS stays relative untouched. Luckily I had no hdd crash on my system partition but still I moved now to a raid.

And all my raids are mirrors with lights indicating if a drive fails.

All of my SSDs are M2 so even raids becomes quite small and portable. 
Except of my external GPU I can move my whole workstation in a backpack. 

LatteIsHorse

EarthQuake, Axi5, thomasp Wow, thank you guys, that was extremely helpful! Thank you for explaining your processes in details. Have a nice weekend

DavidCruz

I did this recently when the thread originally went up, i think i might be misunderstanding it but posting anyway.  Thought it was more geared towards minimizing the space this stuff takes up, i usually wait till the very end, organize it all into whatever i need it into, weapons on the side or in the main zbrush file for instance. (for later use)
Otherwise backups like everyone else nothing fancy drag drop, done for me.
But yea i think i was around 100gb's for the K.A. Entry and i was like this is ridiculous tbh but then again got to save incrementally or you'll have a moment of wtf, maybe the power goes out or your hd decides to die so you can't risk it and make 1000+copies of the damn thing.  Anyway glad they helped you out i wanted to share.