For years, when I saw that, I was just as judgmental. Then I realized that, in the real world, sometimes backups fall by the wayside.

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.

Sure, it does fall by the wayside, but it's inexcusable. Daily commits to some remote repo are so easy that it basically takes effort not to do them. Installing a backup program is similarly trivial, taking a few minutes.

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.

Well, they're so easy once you've taken the time to get your head around how to set them up. Before you've engaged in that minimal amount of shaving, though, it's just one more freaking detail you don't have time for.

Outside of the first sentence, I do nothing but agree with you.

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.

Well the point is, he said they DID make backups, so they did set it up and made time for it.

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.

> 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.

I'm installing (among other things) backup systems. People simply don't backup, unless they've suffered an important data loss at some point. Sad state of the matter.

I assume this is game source?

Why was it not in an externally hosted repository?

Because game source is huge. Absolutely huge.

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.

Come on now, size is no excuse, we're using subversion and git with Unity projects that are well north of 2 GB.

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.

Isn't that the problem that version control has solved? Once the first commit is done you're just uploading deltas/changesets, so the size of the project doesn't really matter.

The deltas weren't exactly small either. Change one animation or move one arm a bit and the model file change completely.

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.

Most version control systems are only suitable for smaller files, not for graphical assets which tend to be much bigger and even if the system supports large files, files using these formats generates big diffs even for smaller changes.

You can even put 2GB on a SD card that you keep at home. As long as you keep the backup in a different location as the original.

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.

Why is 2GB a problem? I use more than that almost every day downloading movies & TV shows...

Then you can't afford not to pay for Dropbox's, or some other service's, 50GB or 100GB plans.