Search Unity

  1. Megacity Metro Demo now available. Download now.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Unity support for visionOS is now available. Learn more in our blog post.
    Dismiss Notice

unity + dropbox - a good way of syncing backing up fil

Discussion in 'Formats & External Tools' started by miriam, Aug 26, 2009.

  1. miriam

    miriam

    Joined:
    Jun 27, 2009
    Posts:
    6
    We have recently discovered this simple (and free) way of syncing our unity project folders on the mac and pc. As a bonus it also backs everything up.

    As other people might find it useful I thought I'd share it.

    we got a free 2GB backup plan from www.getdropbox.com

    This program creates a folder on your computer that gets backed up online.
    You can then install it on another computer and it syncs the two folders for you - meaning you can jump back and forth between the two (of course you could do this if you're working on a network as well, but it's a good alternative if you can't network for some reason).

    And if you ever accidentally delete anything you can go online and redownload it.

    The only issues I've found with it is when I haven't let it finish uploading before shutting the computer down - or downloading before opening unity - this causes unity to complain about missing meta-data files. And sometimes I've tried to delete something only to find that the other computer re-uploads it - but it's only happened a couple of times.
     
  2. Mark-Ripley

    Mark-Ripley

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2007
    Posts:
    148
    Been using Dropbox with a large Unity project for the last six months or so now. It works really well. Some tips:

    1. Don't have Dropbox running all the time, just use it to back up at the end of the day. If you're using Unity iPhone, do a Clean All in XCode to keep the file size down.

    2. Make sure you've closed Unity before starting the backup, so it doesn't start messing with temporary files.

    3. Let the backup complete, so it doesn't get confused.

    4. If you're syncing between two machines, delete your project from your machine with the out of date code on, before syncing. This prevents lots of redundant duplicate files appearing, with the machine name tagged on the end of the filename.

    5. As Dropbox only keeps one copy (there's no update history to can rollback through), I keep a daily zip of the project to just make sure!

    Hope that helps!
     
  3. sama-van

    sama-van

    Joined:
    Jun 2, 2009
    Posts:
    1,734
    I'm sorry but Dropbox has a subversion system....
    Andyou can browse it very easly online in your account.
    2 weeks ago they sent to Dropbox Users an email explaining the subversion system was upgraded.


    On 5st point I would say :

    5. Don't rename your working files everydays or you will lost history on Dropbox and when choising to update an old directory, it will add all the old files you changed the name...
    ...and it will create hell S*** in your project :D
     
  4. Mark-Ripley

    Mark-Ripley

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2007
    Posts:
    148
    Where does it say that? I didn't get an email....

    True, there's a 30-day history of the changes you made, but I didn't fancy trying to do a restore of everything, from, say 3 days ago. Maybe I've missed something but I can't find any mention of a svn-style repository.

    Will be gladly proved wrong though! Got a link?
     
  5. sama-van

    sama-van

    Joined:
    Jun 2, 2009
    Posts:
    1,734
    There is a complete directory undo, vut mnenu is different and yes this is still a crazy bad one and I hope they will update that quickly!! :mrgreen:

    About the history file it gives something like that :



    And the email sent the last month of July was saying that :


    But yes, SVN is quite better and free too, but the problem is the server are a ltitle bit slow and sometime they are down... too often :(

    https://opensvn.csie.org/
     
  6. Mark-Ripley

    Mark-Ripley

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2007
    Posts:
    148
    Ah cool, didn't realise there was a complete directory undo. I just thought, if I'd messed something up and wanted to go back to yesterday's "check-in", I'd have to go through all the individual files (all those Library and Cache files!) and select which to restore.

    I remember now - I did get the email, but I was too busy going "ooh!" at the news of the iPhone version to remember the other stuff :D
     
  7. sama-van

    sama-van

    Joined:
    Jun 2, 2009
    Posts:
    1,734
    Very very becarfull... this is a very bad one... It doesn't mind if you renamed a folder... :eek:

    But yes, it will give you back all past files and directories... haha :twisted:
     
  8. kevinr

    kevinr

    Joined:
    Jul 24, 2008
    Posts:
    263
    I've got another recommendation when it comes to using Dropbox. Use the built in export/import package in Unity and then write the package out to the dropbox. When importing packages, Unity will tell you what has changed and allow you to unselect changed files. That way you can easily avoid updating something that shouldn't be.

    It also allows you to create easy organized packages. Typically we would just export our entire project every time. Occasionally when we were just syncing up a few files, it would be a smaller limited project.
     
  9. A_World_Maker

    A_World_Maker

    Joined:
    Apr 21, 2018
    Posts:
    213
    I use Onedrive to run backups and to transfer updates to my other PC, which I use for Lightmapping, while I get on with more work. I use the Onedrive for business, as it gives me 1tb of space to deal with.

    To get changes to the Onedrive, and retrieve on the other PC, I use FileSync, which I can also run compares to make sure both systems are singing from the same song sheet.

    I do this because I have suffered too many crashes and corrupted files using the built in Collaboration server. One of our projects has a disc footprint of over 18gb and I also suspect using sqlite to keep the syncing done locally is too slow and lacks the power and capacity for large games.