Problems with backing up of game

[JudasFm]

I posted a similar message a while ago about having problems displaying sprites, but as I was able to restore from a backup, this was solved.  I now have a far more drastic problem.  For some reason, when I backed up my files, the .spr file decreased in size from 3.8MB to 1.2 MB.  I've now lost almost every single character, every single animation I have; as far as the sprite file goes, these no longer exist.  Some of these can (thankfully) be restored from earlier backups, but most are gone.  I'm not particularly hopeful, but does anyone out there have any solution?? I mean, should I start doing backups of the backup files or something?  :'(

[Scorpiorus]

hmm, thats strange. How do you backup them actually? Basically, you just zip the whole game folder and that should work fine. Maybe you have a problem with restoring them back because of a error in .zip file? How do you store the backups? Could it be a damaged data meduim (floppy disk) or something.

[JudasFm]

Well, I zip all the files mentioned in the 'Backing up your game' section of help.  It's stored on my hard disk drive and most of the time, that works fine; it's just this one time that, for some reason, the file seemed to shrink

[Scorpiorus]

So, is it unziped w/o any kind of errors? Then could it be you had ziped a different sprite file from another project? As I said above I'd archive the entire game directory rather than ripping out all the neccessary files to zip them later. Sorry, I can't be of much help here.

[SSH]

I believe that saving your game as a template backs up everything, so maybe you can do that and then zip the agt file?

Personally, I keep all my original copies of sprites separate form the game anyway. This is kinda automatic if you use a layered format for your originals, anyway...

It sounds like you accidentally copied something over your file. You may be able to use a data recovery program to find the old copy of the file (this is generally easier if you do it straight away). Look for undelete programs on download.com.

[JudasFm]

Yeah; I've unzipped it countless times before and since the problem began.  Also, I know for a fact I didn't zip a different sprite file because I only have the one project going (I'm kinda single-minded and this game was almost finished which made it worse  :'() All the room files and programming are still there (thankfully!) it's just the sprites.  I think in future I'll export all sprite files to hard drive, floppy disk and save them on my other PC, just to be on the safe side Backing up all files is very difficult on this computer; at most I have 20MB to play with, and that's only if I close all background programs and don't start anything else.  It runs on prehistoric hamster power Luckily I did keep a file with the animations of the main character, so that's still intact *wipes sweat from forehead*
Thanks for trying though; like I say, I wasn't too hopeful, I just posted here in case it was a bug in the program or something Oh well...back to square forty.