Unity, Big Mistake

I just got an emal saying that from the 9th onwards Im only going to got 1 gbstorage on collab!! I have a 5gb game or more and without that space ill have absolutly no backup. Why the hell would you milk this out? Its just going to deter people form using unity and they will migrate to unreal. Is that what you want?

Not really sure how to explain it better than the email. Collab is a service, if you need more of that service then you need to pay for it like every other service.

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Oh, good! Now we can get Collaborate with Personal for a reasonable price. I have waiting to see if that would happen. Looks like the prices for additional cloud storage is pretty good too.

There are a lot of other storage options out there too. Try Github, or even Google Drive, which is very cheap. You lose the colab and auto build part but my guess is that is not something you need.

I really like that Unity gives us the opportunity to use the Personal version for free. Now they are even allowing us to pay for extra services! Very nice.

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I think OP knows this. He/she’s just venting about Unity turning the screws with their vendor lock-in and suggesting it’s a bad idea.

There are several free alternatives to Unity Collab. The fact that Collab is proprietary and can change at any time is the reason I stick with good old git. Bitbucket and Visual Studio Online both offer free private git hosting. Granted bitbucket and VSO could start charging at any time too but being a regular old git repo, I could move it anywhere anytime and keep all history.

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Agreed. I guess with all of the options available I can’t see why anyone would be so dramatically tilted over a change like this. It seems pretty standard.

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No sane person picks their engine based on something like that.

Better get to setting up a new backup then. Clock’s ticking. Good luck!

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I didn’t realize that Unreal had free version control. Hasn’t Unity been warning us for ages about changes to collaboration when it came out of beta? I have to say that I have not paid much attention since I am using Visual Studio Online for free.

Out of curiosity, what files/folders need to be stored online for Collaboration/version control. On visual studio, I am using version control for everything except for the Library folder. My whole project directory is ~7.5GB with my Library folder and Assets folder each being ~2.5GB

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How does this come as a surprise to you? it was always going to be a service with free and paid tiers. If you were part of the beta then you must have read what it was about back then.

It also went out of beta 6 months ago with mails and a blog post describing the tier differences: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/06/28/feature-highlight-unity-teams/

Since you also mention Unreal, can you post a link to their equal service where they host a private repo for your projects which you share with couple of friends.

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If you are only using it for a backup (and not for multi-user collaboration), then you could pick up an inexpensive USB drive for doing a backup.

I can’t believe they give a gig out for free. I love that. Thanks Unity!

Not if you want things backed up properly and reliably. There are plenty of well documented, good reasons to avoid manual backup “systems” like that.

What documented reasons? Genuine curious. As long as you’re not relying on the Library folder for anything, I can’t see an issue with it.

It’s nothing to do with Unity or its folders. I was going to link something, but after a quick search I mostly found people trying to sell stuff. In short:

  • Manual backups rely on people, who are unreliable. They’re regularly missed or otherwise messed up somehow.
  • USB or other local storage based backups are easily lost, stolen or damaged. Related, if your backup is physically near your workstation then something that damages it could take out your backup as well (flood, fire, theft, hacker attack, etc.).
  • It’s easy to mess up the backup as you make it, eg: accidentally copy corrupt data over good data, now you’ve lost both, eg: get hacked while the backup USB is plugged in, now your backup is also being held to ransom…
  • Local backups just aren’t very redundant. Copying to a USB stick means something is on your computer and one USB stick. Copying the same stuff to a (decent) online service means that it’s stored on a network which is itself also backed up.
  • It’s actually more effort than most automated solutions.

A manual backup to USB is better than not having a backup at all, but I wouldn’t rely on it for anything I really cared about.

Note that in the context of software / game development I wouldn’t recommend a specific “backup system” for small teams in most use cases anyway. Put all of your stuff in remote version control with a reliable provider, because this implicitly backs up your work*.

  • The catch is things that are outside of software development processes and generate large files. Things like captured footage and video editing source aren’t are classic examples here.
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I’m still interested in new good solutions for those. Backup drive in a bank vault ticks many of the security boxes, but it’s a huge pain to maintain even a once a month cycle which I’m getting nowhere close to. So my daily backup is still on an internal drive. Even USB 2.0 is so slow it would drive me crazy for backups.

We (theoretically) just put things in cloud storage as we work on them.

The “theoretically” is a classic example of manual backups being unreliable because of the human element. When I’ve cut together videos with commentary I always put the video in our storage, but I don’t always gather up all of the source bits and put them up. So if we had to edit one after my house burned down… low risk, but still something I’d want handled if I were paying me for this. :wink:

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Yeah so hows that free collab on Unreal working out for you?

In any case, it costs almost nothing to pay for collab (30 cents a day for 25gb) - surely an adult or responsible person is capable of funding your 30 cents per day?

Alternatively a sub to plus also includes collab.

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The problem I have is that I have many photoshop files of 1gb or bigger, and for every change you’d need to reupload the whole file again. That leads to me easily outpacing my upload bandwidth with data creation on some days. And an initial upload of several TB of data would already take up my whole upload bandwith for weeks. I’m not even 100% sure if my ISP would allow so much upstream traffic for so long.

Normally, I don’t put my raw edit files from Maya, Photoshop, ect, into my main Unity project file for this reason. I use an external backup drive with auto software and something like Carbonite or Google Drive. With Unity the main thing I’m concerned about it Unity stuff.

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Thanks, I figured you meant something like a PICNIC error. Yeah, those account for 90% of problems.

Use git LFS

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