"Oh no, I lost my project! If only I had made backups!"

[WHAM]

Heyo!

Thought I'd share a trick of mine, which I began using for backing up my AGS projects after a hardware breakdown cost me both my project files and my backups, which were on the same machine, but on a different hard drive.

The solution I use is Dropbox (www.dropbox.com).

Step 1) Create an account and install Dropbox (other similiar solutions might also work, I just haven't tested them. Onedrive is also free.)
Step 2) After installing, you should have a folder called "Dropbox" on your PC. Create a new folder within, called AGS or something like that.
Step 3) Start up AGS and create a new project inside the dropbox data folder (or just move an old project there)
Step 4) Use AGS as you normally would, without fear of critical data loss in case of hardware failure

What happens is, whenever AGS updates a file, it is immediately synced to the Dropbox servers and kept there. If you lose a hard drive, you can just download the project onto any machine connected to the internet. I use this to work on multiple workstations. Dropbox is also a great place to store sprites, documents etc, and you don't have to worry about backups.

Dropbox is free in it's basic version, providing about 2 gigs of storage space, though if you projects are massive (more than 2 gigabytes) then the paid version does get a bit expensive for my liking.

The only downside I've seen so far is that occasionally, when compiling the game, AGS gives an error due to a file being reserved by dropbox. Recompiling immediately afterwards works every time, so this is only a minor annoyance.

Never forget backups, people! Ever!

-WHAM

[Stupot]

Dropbox is great, and I'm going to start using it again now that have genuinely* unlimited data allowance. But check your internet package first because I made the mistake of using Dropbox when I was staying at my sister's house and it took ages to work out why her internet was being constantly throttled.

*some data companies have a very loose definition of the word "unlimited".

[StillInThe90s]

Also, but slightly off topic, they removed the old "public" folder which allowed you to use it as a basic server (for sharing downloadable links, posting images and testing web based stuff). Not a big issue for ags devs I suppose, but it made sharing files a lot less sleek. The feature is still there if you installed dropbox a while ago or if you pay for it. So think twice before uninstalling...

[Crimson Wizard]

I use bitbucket in combination with Dropbox.
Bitbucket is a free Git repository hosting. I commit the history of project changes there, and put compiled versions as well as large game files in Dropbox.

AGS still has particular problems when used with version control systems. One is that it does not keep rooms in the raw state (background image / properties / script separated), but recompiles them all into binary blobs whenever you just change a script module. And version control detects that as change.
For this reason I manually control whether a room file should be saved into next history step or not (depending on what I changed).

[Anian]

There's also Copy which offers 15gb in the free version, otherwise it's basically the same as Dropbox. You can use it as a disk (when you install it) or you can use them via browser with drag-n-drop feature etc.
I don't know about Copy, but I use Dropbox as a backup for photos I take with my mobile phone, pics get uploaded as I take them.

Google Drive is also ok, with some additional tools on google account, but although Dropbox and Copy are slow, Google Drive is veeeeeeeeeery slow.