Hey, been learning Blender and now that I have a few projects I was wondering how can you do backups? I searched online and basically people said that userpref is good to backup, how about .blend files? If you don’t have videos or anything like that, is it just necessary to backup the .blend files and then you can resume your project?
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Blender has its own version system.
Ever encountered a .blend1 file?
Is an older version of your current version!
By default, Blender saves only one backup version, but you can change that in the preferences.
Also, you can use your own file increment too. If you use save as, than at the right side of the file name you can see a +/- button to increase your file number.
Like myfile-009, when pressing +, will be myfile-010.
Many students use this as basic versioning. I did that too, but nowadays, because I’m more confident with Blender I mostly use one backup file. But would advise you to use as many versions as you like, especially when you do destructive things, like applying modifiers or deleting stuff.
Others with programming experience will use GIT, but it has no real advantages!
Also remember when saving many versions of the project, and using an asset library. You get a lot of duplicates. Not a big problem I think, yet as a student.
Furthermore you can save your backup on a memory stick or the cloud.
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Ok, so you basically just need the .blend file to resume your project? Really simple if so!
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I’m a bit confused now.
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Sorry, my original question was: what files would I need to copy to my cloud account in order to save my work? I have understood it so that you only need the .blend files to do so
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Yes!
… but
If you have materials created with image nodes (stone texture, bump maps, etc.).
Those are external Blender assets that need to be copied to your backup cloud.
This will introduce a small problem of file locations.
Blender uses relative path names to external files.
This means if this copied Blender file is started from a different location, then it can not find those external resources. Resulting in purple materials. This is the way Blender lets you know, it can not find those resources. You need to re-link them manually again.
There is also another option, to include all the required external resources in your Blend file. Very handy, previous file location problems are gone. But your Blend file size will increase massively. Because all the images are inside Blender and just one file to backup.
Most people will not do this, because most people will have a library of textures where all projects will reuse these material textures. One resource map, many projects.
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Oh, making a resource library at some point would be handy!
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Between resource packing, using libraries, or using different blend files, it really depends on the context and how you’re trying to use each “version”.
@FedPete summed up the resource packing strategy quite nicely – but I wouldn’t completely count out Git, either! You might not be able to use it in the traditional manner of… say… diffing individual lines of code in a pull request. But I’ve actually it to be quite useful for simply having “snapshots” of a blend file – or even an entire directory of files for a project – at certain points in time.
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Yea, I guess there’s many different ways of doing it!
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