Sorry guys, but despite my efforts to enter into this contest, the bad luck of a HD crash has left me with no choice but to skip it. Unfortunately I had nearly all of my important code that Ive done recently on that HD, along with a lot of other data. I guess I can only be thankful that my primary HD didnt kick it in. Best of luck to everyone thats entering.. youve one less person to compete with!

Thats a bummer, there is almost nothing more frustraiting than losing work you have done. I myself am not able to enter because I jsut dont have enough time to get mine done.

Aight... I know what that feels like. My condolences, man - I hope you didn''t go on a rampage and destroy everything in a 50 mile radius (as that''s what I remember feeling like doing when this happened to me).

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Ever heard of backing up? No, that would take an extra 5 minutes, it''s much better to start from scratch. Sorry, I find it hard to feel sympathy for something that can be so easily avoided. Next time, don''t be so lazy.

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
Ever heard of backing up? No, that would take an extra 5 minutes, it''s much better to start from scratch. Sorry, I find it hard to feel sympathy for something that can be so easily avoided. Next time, don''t be so lazy.

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Funny... I guess you''re so rich you don''t care about the $200 that hard drives cost?

Or maybe you''re just in the mood to laugh in peoples faces.

Anyway, I''m probably not going to finish either. There''s not much chance of my current scene (cube-mapped dynamic water that''s boring) winning, and I doubt I have time to do much else... so, blah.

Who said it had to be a hard drive???? And what drive costs $200? You don''t need 200GB of space just to backup code. CD burners are <$40 at Sam''s Club (and many other places). If you want a HD, you can get 20GB drives for <$20 at second hand computer stores. There are plenty of affordable options. I''m not laughing at the guy. It sucks, but its like getting in a car wreck without wearing a seatbelt.

There is the point a view that a computer is not a useable system until there is a back-up solution (heard of floppies? CD-R? ftp a zip file to a personal web space?). I tend to agree (after learning the hard way, of course).

It''s really hard to buy a computer without CD-R these days. New CD-R drives are $29.

If you have "personal web space" then use it. Back up small, hard-to-create things (like .cpp and .h files) to it at least weekly, if not at the end of each session. Write a script to make it easy. Use putty/pscp to make it simpler, if you''re on Windows. Or rsync.

The next step is source control: if you have a second machine, or a second hard drive (which is about $50 for a slow, quiet one) then you should set up a CVS or Subversion repository on that drive, and check in your changes to that drive frequently. Note that going offsite is still a great idea, because if there''s a fire or someone breaks in and steals your stuff, a second hard drive in the same case won''t help.

Not backing up at all just doesn''t cut it. As the OP learned the hard way -- which is the best way :-) Just make sure you ACTUALLY learn from this, and don''t repeat it. At that point, people are justified to point and laugh ;-)

Its not that I dont backup.. all critical data is backed up. Its that a lot of it wasnt critical data (even though a lot of the code lost was important to me, its not critical as I dont do coding professionally).

Personally I dont see need to backup source code for an OpenGL contest, so when I backup critical data I dont include it.

And as for prices, read next to my name where it says Im from... Australia. CD-Rs are not $29, they are closer to $100, and being on a relatively low income I have to be careful where money goes, especially when I am still paying off another car.