Insurance won’t cover Hello Games office flood, dev says

Hello Games’ studio was flooded on Christmas Eve after a nearby river broke its bank, resulting in the loss of computers, furniture and personal items.

Backup. Then backup again. Then offsite backup. Then rotate offsite backup.

I wish some news article would mention if the Hello Games team was using offsite backup. It seems dangerous to store your game code on Dropbox or even in a private Github repository, but the physical world is equally happy to destroy your possessions.

I’m doing my part. I pay for Dropbox, on which I store all my valuable files. Development projects are in public and private Github repositories. And I finally found a use for that Mac mini I had lying around: every night it runs Calendar events to store Dropbox, Github, and e-mail on an external drive. My next step is buying two external drives and rotating them monthly in a bank’s safe deposit box.

Here are the automator scripts I’m using. You’ll want to change the paths on each step unless your username also happens to be JordanRoher. I have two steps for backing up Gmail since Automator can’t tell when the Mail app is done downloading. I run the check action, then half an hour later run the archive one.

Stay safe out there on the Internet!