by Rahul
It seems so unnecessary to make a backup of our ev3 program at the end of each working session. We always thought it was one of those rules that don't apply to us. However we learned our lesson the hard way, and we don't want other rookie teams to go through the same. So we are sharing our experience here.
We started programming our missions right after the run strategy was decided. We had rules about doing the backups etc, but we we didn't pay much attention. After few weeks of programming effort, we realized that our program was suddenly deleted by accident from our working PC (we still cannot explain the mystery how it disappeared). We lost so much of work and wished we had followed up the back up rule we had setup for everyone.
Backup and version control discipline are very important because they can save your data when it disappears or gets deleted. Our group lost our progress in one of our missions because we did not save it, so we decided to create a dropbox account. We used a dropbox account because it was efficient and reliable and is accessible from any computer. In the dropbox account we would save another copy of our missions in this account so we could restore our progress if it was lost. We will also save multiple versions of the program. If a major change we were doing did not work, we could always go back to the last working version of the program.
This later on actually helped us several times, because we actually deleted our file by accident, but with the dropbox account we restored the data. Sometimes we forgot to bring our laptop to the team working area, but we could always use other laptop.
This is really an example of many of those skills/disciplines we learned from FLL challenge this year that will be useful lifelong.
We started programming our missions right after the run strategy was decided. We had rules about doing the backups etc, but we we didn't pay much attention. After few weeks of programming effort, we realized that our program was suddenly deleted by accident from our working PC (we still cannot explain the mystery how it disappeared). We lost so much of work and wished we had followed up the back up rule we had setup for everyone.
Backup and version control discipline are very important because they can save your data when it disappears or gets deleted. Our group lost our progress in one of our missions because we did not save it, so we decided to create a dropbox account. We used a dropbox account because it was efficient and reliable and is accessible from any computer. In the dropbox account we would save another copy of our missions in this account so we could restore our progress if it was lost. We will also save multiple versions of the program. If a major change we were doing did not work, we could always go back to the last working version of the program.
This later on actually helped us several times, because we actually deleted our file by accident, but with the dropbox account we restored the data. Sometimes we forgot to bring our laptop to the team working area, but we could always use other laptop.
This is really an example of many of those skills/disciplines we learned from FLL challenge this year that will be useful lifelong.