As I sat down for the day to work on implementing and testing a key feature. I was greeted with my scene no longer working. I had made a few small changes the day before. The last of which was creating barriers so the player could no longer fly off into the great beyond. 

  Now, I tested everything like I do before I save and commit my changes to git. Everything was working. Specifically, the track was spawning and deleting grids as expected. However, as of this morning this was no longer working.  The lighting was also busted with my scene mostly dark. 

I began to work on troubleshooting and eventually found what I thought was wrong, but my changes did not fix the issue. I had a choice. Either I continue to troubleshoot the issue, or I revert to my backup. I decided to lose a little bit of progress and revert. Once I pulled the files from my TrueNAS server and reloaded the scene. Everything was working again and the only thing I lost was the barriers I made the day before.

I felt relieved that I had the option to revert. Version control is 100% necessary if you want any assurance that your project will be available when you're ready to work. I've had that feeling. The sinking feeling in your stomach when you know you have lost everything.  As developers, we pour so much hard work into what we make. To lose it all just because we don't take the time to make backups is a travesty. 

In closing.  If you don't know how to use version control, do yourself a favor and learn more about it and how to make backups. Below is a video that sums up how to setup SourceTree pretty well. Basically, Git doesn't handle larger files well by default. SourceTree makes version control with larger files very simple. There are others out there as well, but SourceTree is what I use and didn't have too much trouble getting it up and working. 

For a NAS drive with some kind of array. Using a spare PC, you can look into setting up a TrueNAS server for backups. There are other options out there, but I've had good luck with my TrueNAS server, and it was very straightforward setting things up. 

  Below is a link to the SourceTree setup video and to TrueNAS. There are other options out there and I suggest looking into all options before settling on a final solution that works best for you. 

TrueNAS