Hello! To begin with, I think in pictures so sometimes I can’t convey what I’m trying to say. If that happens, please please please let me know and I’ll try to clear it up!
I save frequently, but today I thought it would be neat to view an older backup scene within the project and see how broken it had become, and see how far said project had gone.
What I did not expect was for this action to somehow roll back my actual scene to a save before my last Ctrl+S. In fact it actually loaded a save that happened before multiple Ctrl+S’s.
I’m very, very confused how I did it. Everything else like the scripts are untouched, but the scene rolled back to a save before I implemented a board in said scene. It’s weird and it fascinates me.
Because I am working on a prototype and the real work is into the script, I am more curious than annoyed on how this works. And, I’d be interested to learn how to not repeat this mistake in the future. I’m also now interested in learning how Unity saves a project when the user hits Ctrl+S.
So, essentially, two questions: (1) is there a way to recover your saves without the “collaborate” tab method (my computer is offline 85% of the time, so I doubt it saved that work to the Unity cloud). And (2), how does Unity save? Are there any good links to how projects save? I’m planning on looking this one up after I post this, but you guys may have some great links I can’t find (that, and I don’t want to find out if Unity refreshes the page lol).
Cheers, and thanks for taking time out of your day to read these!
I’m sorry you’ve had this issue. Please consider using proper industrial-grade source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.
Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).
You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.
As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:
https://discussions.unity.com/t/736093/3
Here’s how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:
https://discussions.unity.com/t/807568/3
Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:
https://discussions.unity.com/t/826718/2
Share/Sharing source code between projects:
https://discussions.unity.com/t/719810/2
Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:
https://discussions.unity.com/t/834885/5
Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):
https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-git-with-unity
It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place.
“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards
Oh wow That’s a lot of links! Thank you! I’ll start really digging into it. I think I was actually pretty lucky. The scripts are up-to-date and in-tact, and the save the actual project reverted to isn’t too far back (I can redo what I lost in thirty minutes tops). It’s just weird lol, but a fascinating weird. It makes me wonder what’s really under the hood of a Crtl+S click haha. Will definitely follow the wisdom of an external save source though, and dive into the links you shared.