XSIBlog

Hot on the heels of Luc-Eric’s blurb on XSI’s Autosave, lets talk a bit about the Scene Backups.

Accessible in the same Data Management section of the Preferences as the Autosave you’ll find the Scene Backups preferences. Contrary to the Autosave the Scene Backup is stored inside the project’s Backup directory and not the system directory. While an autosave is created from the current state of your work at regular intervals, the backup is created when you explicitely save (CTRL+S). Before your save starts and the .scn file in the Scene folder is overwritten a copy is put in the backup folder allowing you to roll back to a previously saved version if you ever require.

This all means that the two functions have very different purposes. The autosave is to avoid loosing too much work in case of a crash, power failiure, meteor shower or alien invasion while the backup is more for those cases when you’ve worked for a while, saved, sent to render or whatever and realized your previous version was better.

Now, the autosave and backup features are great from an artist’s standpoint but if you were to put on your sysadmin hat, if it fits, you would soon realize that these functions create a lot of data. With autosave on and a backup level of two you’re liable to have on disk 4 times as much data as is necessary. If you’re dealing with small files it’s not that bad. If you’ve got 150-200MB scene files you better start doing some cleaning up or you’ll fill up your storage pretty quick!

Here is a little python script that deletes scenes from backup folders that you can use as a starting point to do some of your cleanup work. We run such a script regularly at Buzz and once recovered over 200GB of storage space in one execution. If you do use these options I do suggest you keep an eye on the storage space they can wind up using, you could be surprised.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2005 at 9:52 am and is filed under General, Python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.