Backup. Do it.

Hi guys. This just happened to me and I lost about 5 hours worth (2 days) or work.

I made 3 mistakes, specially considering I should know better.
Mistake number 1. Let one day go by without versioning. That would have cut my losses in half.

Then, java (or stencyl) got slow. Maybe it ate too much memory (Windows 7 x64 will open java's appetite) and was feeling too fat.
It never happened before with stencyl. Whatever, I saved my work. I saved it again. I tried to shut it down. It asked me save again (here comes the second one). I said yes. If I had it saved, I should have left it at that. But I wasn't thinking.

It took forever and a half to save (are you feeling number 3 coming up around the corner?). I waited. Then I tried to shutdown stencyl while it was saving. Then I waited about three whole seconds. I shutdown my computer without the game beig completely saved (nobel prize for human error please). I ended up with a corrupt data.xml.

With this true tale, I bid farewell to you.
To one and all, I ask you to take heed, Augustus himself bestowed it upon posterity: Festina lente.  (more haste, less speed).

Fine. While I know what svn/git are I don't know how to use them because they are too complex. Both 'man svn' and 'man git' gave me BIG headache. Also even if I know how to use it I don't know of any free svn/git providers.

I save all the time to make sure my changes get compiled. As for backups I just close stencylworks when I overload it because I usually have a very recent (several minutes ago) save anyways.

I made an extension to back up games some months ago. Combined with a Dropbox folder it can be a life saver.

I'll release again soon.

I save all the time to make sure my changes get compiled. As for backups I just close stencylworks when I overload it because I usually have a very recent (several minutes ago) save anyways.

Excellent point. i do that all the time myself just to be safe. I tend to go to the game folder and make a duplicate copy of my game.

As for Stencyl getting slow, I sometimes turned on memory usage monitor (control-shift-esc keys on window). For my computer, once it reaches 400K, I start to save and close my game, exit SW and reopen it.

400K(bytes?!)? What java do you have? I want Java with so low memory usage too!

400K(bytes?!)? What java do you have? I want Java with so low memory usage too!

He means 400K Megabytes, which is 400,000 MB

Then I'm jealous of his mainframe, because only mainframes have such big RAM.

...4GB is common in mainstream computers now.

Rhys, that's 400GB.

I am completely lost and do not know what any of you are talking about anymore :S

Ai think he means 400K kilobytes which is 400 MB or 400,000 KB (as task manager shows it)

Darkhog, there are free svn repositories out there. Try google (and because I'm in a good mood, Unfuddle and ProjectLocker).

If you think svn is too hard, try dropbox. It's easy enough and has plenty of space for several projects.

Alexin, I think your extension might have helped me. I have actually made an extension request a while ago asking to "run a file". I would then point it to run a batch file for versioning and backup purposes.
Alas, I have no extensions available to me, so I have to remind myself to do it. and I forgot a few times. And one of those times something happened.

To the developers (Hey Jon!): Can we get a duplicate data.xml save? Something like data.bak. I don't know how you would implement it or at which time this file would be created, but I do know that I have seen some new users having trouble with their data.xml file. Mind you, I have no excuse, because as I said before, I should have known better, but there are people out there that don't have the experience or know-how to backup frequently.

Mind you, this really is a great tool, and I will continue to work with it with or without these minor snags. You guys (developers and community) are really doing a great job and this is a wonderful place to be and work.

You may always use Windows' task scheduler or Cron, if you're on Linux.