One of the artists in the development team I'm apart of, recently had a major issue. She had a portable hard drive that she kept everything on. Generally speaking this usually works very well, and lots of students here have a portable hard drive, USB or something that they carry with them. Otherwise things all go up to the cloud, and people pull things down as they need them. But here's the issue: What happens when those things don't work? You MUST have a back up plan.
What happened is her hard drive died. We have some very tech savvy people here at the university but unfortunately there was no saving the thing. It also happened to be the only place she kept many of the things she worked on for the game! She got what she could but when that hard drive died... POOF! Gone.
I probably should have saved...
Hours and hours of work just evaporated. Needless to say, she wasn't particularly thrilled by this turn of events. We'll be perfectly fine, she's a very talented artist and fortunately she didn't lose anything absolutely crucial but it's still a pain. However, I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone to BACK UP YOUR FILES! It's easy to do and will save you hours/days/weeks+ of work.
I can almost hear people now: "Its safe in the cloud" <-- NO! Bad! The cloud is great, and often does protect you from several of the pitfalls of physical devices. But there have been more than a couple occasions that people only had their work up in the cloud and when the internet goes down or even that specific site, they're just as screwed as anyone else. Honestly I usually keep my work in 2-3 places AT LEAST if it's important.
