I was going to ask this question on Unity Answers, though the forums might be a better place for this.
I’ve been working with Unity for a bit of time now, and starting a project with a small team. It’s still a side-project for now, which mean we’re not a company yet, we don’t have a physical studio to sit and no on-floor server to save our data and daily work.
So I come here for advice, which online service would you recommend as backup/repository (perforce-alike) that would work with a free client ( most likely turtoise, or any proprietary tool coming along the said service ) ?
Right now we’re using private github repository for code, but obviously it’s not suited for textures, 3d models and their sources ( heavy .psd and .max ), we need at least around 5-10gb of storage which is the big issue I had when wandering around the web looking for a solution.
At last I will go with Assembla that some of you might know, though I find it slightly expensive and I’m not quite sure it’s the best solution.
We could also go with a paid Google Drive or Dropbox account, but I’m not sure it’s a good idea on the long run : team expending, things getting more ‘professionnal’ than they are, building a company around the project, any situation where making a wrong choice now would be a sudden and unwanted drag. Plus I never used them for team work before.
So here we are, If you could share your data-related experiences, what went wrong, what went well, that would really help ! I want to make a solid choice
For small groups, I’ve been happy with keeping repositories on Dropbox. There’s a pretty good upgrade path: try the workflow for free until you reach 2 GB, then go Pro for $99/year for 1 TB (!) of space, then $15/month/user if you want to go Business. It’s very easy to share a repo folder: right-click, select Share, then distribute the URL.
However, there’s one big gotcha. The repo technically sits on your local disk storage, in your Dropbox folder. Changes are synced to the cloud, and then your teammates’ Dropbox folders pull down the changes. (If you had a physical studio with a LAN, syncs would run over the LAN.)
The advantage is that you always have a copy of the repo even if you don’t have Internet connectivity.
The disadvantage is that there’s a delay syncing your changes to teammates, since it needs to sync up to the cloud and then back down to them. If you commit changes and shut down your workstation before Dropbox syncs to the cloud, they won’t get the changes until the next time you boot up. Dropbox has an icon in the system tray so it’s easy to see whether it’s synced, but you need to remember to check.
If that’s a concern for you, you could install git on bluehost or some other inexpensive web hosting service.
The delay in synching isn’t a big issue, I’m more concerned with ‘locking’ files, and the workflow you have to adopt in order to manage multiples changes on the same file : from my personal experience dropbox sync your changes to the cloud automatically, there is no options such as ‘local modifications only’ or checkin/checkout system… I didn’t saw this kind of features coming along the Pro services of dropbox ? ( that 1TB though… awww. )
Remembering to check whether the sync is done or not is pretty much the same thing as ‘please remember to checkin your changes once you’re done’ so it’s not really an issue there
Oh, I was going to add that in my post and I completely forgot. And it’s such a big issue! Since each workstation essentially has a separate repo, conflicts can arise when they sync to the cloud. Someone will have to resolve conflicts manually. If that’s an issue, you could go with a centralized system such as a web host. (Kotaku has a promotion going on right now with Dreamhost for $2.95 USD/month.)
For my small company (4 people), I use Visual SVN server.
I just host a server on my computer at home and don’t have to pay for hosting costs. Mind you the bandwidth is a bit limited but since our repo isn’t huge,it’s managable.
and run tortoise SVN for my clients.
It’s a well tested platform and doesn’t have any bugs that you’d find in certain other source control solutions. If you’re doing code, the ability to revert to previous versions is a godsend as it can help you track down bugs (by reverting to a version that doesn’t crash/exhibit a particular bug).
Hands down bitbucket.org is the best service out there. We’ve been using it for a few years now. Great connection speed, and best of all it’s free!
Use Mercurial for source control, it’s pretty easy to get started, and is a very solid solution (I believe Unity uses Mercurial internally).
