How do i make a backup of the ENTIRE project (assets, scenes,etc)?

so, i need to reinstall windows soon, and i need to save my unity project because i cant just lose 8 months of my gamedev progress.
but how should I do this? if i just make a .zip archive of my project folder (that one folder in the Users/user directory), and then unarchive it later, will it work? if yes, will there be any possible problems?
or is there any better way of backup’ing your project?

yes it works, I’ve used this method all the time. to be ultra safe ensure you have the same folder structure where you unzip the files.

so if is on D:\projects\finallyworked\yourproject

if you zip and unzip yourproject after reinstall avoid unzipping in D:\ directly, have same structure

it may work fine anyway but just to be safe

a more advanced backup of this style is to get rid of the files that unity can recreate. those files take a lot of space like a lot, even 80% of the total and have a lot of files that will take forever to pack inside an archive (I suggest creating a store archive to cut on packing time) if you have a huge project like 100Gb you better look into this option. But you should know what you are doing, because deleting a file or folder that is esential you will probably brick the project. Also even then there is a small chance you will have some issues after if unity encounters problems when rebuilding those files. So you should probably have a full backup just in case.

how big is your project folder and how many files it has?

Unity projects are portable; It’s no problem to move them around. You don’t need to zip it if you don’t need to. Just have an external drive and move everything you want to carrying over to the next install over onto it.

The Library folder of project is of course only a temporary cache, so that can safely be deleted to dramatically reduce the size of some projects.

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11 gb and 236054 files. i’ll still do a full backup. thank you for your answer!

the advantage of zipping with the option to store the files and not apply compression is that it takes less time to copy the files. if you have a normal external disk not ssd it takes forever to copy those hundred of thousands of files. if you do frequent manual backups this time saving adds up.

this offcourse is the poor man backup solution, I’m sure there are better automatic ways to do it locally.

I’ve used this “pack everything including the library” before adding a new asset store product that can destroy everything (or when updating a complex asset). that way if something got wrong I can just delete the project folder and unzip the archive and avoid unity regenerating all the stuff all over again. for reference it did gets wrong sometimes that is statistically relevant so I recommend this always for important projects

then just to have project backed up for storage I’ve removed everything that can be removed and zip it out and store it locally on some external drive.

Sorry if I am mistaken, but I feel like you are not using Git & GitHub (or one of its alternatives). I think its a good idea to have a cloud backup (GitHub) so that even if something happens to your PC in the future, you can still re-download the files.

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Version control is a great way to make backups.
But if you want an easy way to zip without the unnecessary files, try Export Project to Zip.
It’s a free, open source tool I created, available through the Asset Store.
It lets you zip directly from the Unity File menu.
It works on Windows and macOS, with Unity 2021.3+ (including Unity 6).

wow, that is a very useful tool to have

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