Archiving policy

[OPEN_RANGE]

I'm curious about the archiving strategy or policy others might employ. I like to remove projects form my system once they are done. Occasional, not often, they come back at a later date for revisions or etc. Sometimes even a few years later.

Currently I use the Max:Archive. I save the scene.zip file, whatever final render output file, like scene.exr, and also frame buffer history vrimage files. I burn those files, along with photoshop .psd and final .jpg, onto a dvd. since I'm a worrier I make a duplicate dvd and store that in a safe deposit box.

I also save any new texture maps, model/components and materials I may have created to various libraries I have on my system.

Seems like a lot of effort and sort of tedious and time consuming. Curious what others may do in this regard or if there is a "best practice"?

[flino2004]

I zip it and move it to my archive drive exactly like it is....I have a drive only for assets so inside every projects I have a MAP folder where I have all the custom maps that I used for that specific project..... if some textures I think I would use them again they go to my asset drive.
if for any reason one of those projects come alive again I unzip it to the working drive and done....easier and faster because keeps everything with the same paths and organization.

[OPEN_RANGE]

thanks for your reply. that's essentially what I do except I burn to DVD and then make duplicate to store off site in safe deposit.

do you back up your archive drive to a cloud service in case your archive drive fails or is damaged by catastrophe?

[flino2004]

I don't burn anything in DVD....the last time I did that was like 10 years ago.....I use RAID (3 copies of everything) the third one I back up only archives twice a year.
in case of a catastrophe probably somebody would find me dead right next to my computers and drives so I don't care about that.