5 - Backup Backup Backup
Backup your project files. Seriously.
Recently, I was working on a short film with some classmates as a school project. I was the sole composer / video editor for the film, so I had all the project files.
In total, I had four Ableton project files.
During a regular storage cleanup, I had accidentally deleted two of the four project files. I didn’t realize it until I went back into Ableton to work on it.
Ableton shows that it can’t find the project file by greying it out on the Recently Opened menu. So, imagine my confusion when I found out that two very important project files were greyed out.
I looked up the project files through voidtool’s Everything (very useful tool) to search the entire computer.
It couldn’t find it.
Cue me, and by proxy, my classmates panicking thinking I lost all progress.
I was essentially screwed, especially since one of the two tracks was very essential to the film. By then, I was attached to the final versions of the tracks and I knew I couldn’t replicate it. I had to start from scratch.
Or so I thought.
In every session I have working on a single project, I typically render out the end result of that day. So, there was a chance there was a slightly older version of the tracks sitting on my drive, just named differently.
And after alot of searching, there it was. Older versions of the tracks.
Had I not rendered those out, I would’ve been forced to recreate the tracks in a very short amount of time. Obviously I couldn’t do that cause I am not a wizard like Virtual Riot.
But most importantly, this incident taught me that I should probably backup important things like project files.
So I’m making this story a blog post as a general reminder.