Backup is one of the most important, and often neglected, aspect of anyone doing business online.

Surely as game indie dev the first thought goes to the content. Source code, art, sounds, any kind of asset. Backing those up is essential . It never cease to amaze me how often I heard even experienced developer say “I lost xxx because didn’t make the backup since 1 month and the HD crashed”.

Where and how to backup? a cool little utility I found is Cobian Backup, very nice and easy to use. You can of course make your custom code, or use anything else you want, as simple as just copying the file with windows explorer to an external device, but you MUST DO IT OFTEN.

I do it daily. Call me paranoic, but if tomorrow morning I wake up and my Pc somehow doesn’t start, I can restore everything with my external HD. And just in case I have another Pc and a Mac iBook with some less recent backup, but never 1 month old.

I would say, use also backup devices like DVD-RW, but don’t trust them too much. In my experience, they don’t last long, usually becoming unreadable after few months. Better just use a DVD-R and make a backup after reaching an important milestone. The best is an external USB Hard-Disk, and have also other Pc or even, if you have a dedicated server, do a online backup. With a RAR archive and a password protected file (of course choose at least a 16-32 characters encryption word) you’re quite safe.

Do backup also of your online stuff if you have any. Forums, blogs, sites. Anything. Forums comes usually with backup, and even blog software like WordPress (the one I’m using) has backup script available. Use them, losing 1 year of posts would be bad for your traffic 😉

I’m using it right now!

That’s a good question. One of the first ones you should consider, if you’re interested in starting to be an indie developer but also in general for ANY kind of work-at-home business!

The answer could be “maybe”, but recently I am more gearing towards “No”.

Why? you could ask yourself. Well let’s take for example the best connection you can have, beside DSL. That is, ISDN connection, maybe using both channel, for 128 kB/s upload/download speed. In indie business, UPLOAD speed is almost important (if not MORE important) than download. Indeed during your work, you’ll normally find yourself uploading a lot of times, expecially the day/week of release.

Even if you did an extensive beta-testing, there WILL ALWAYS BE (Murphy’s law) unexpected bug popping out exactly the day of release or shortly after it 🙂

So as you can imagine, and expecially if you opt for a fullversion download, the upload speed will become crucial. Even using the 2 ISDN channels a 15mb file (which is the average now for a shareware game) takes 15-20 minutes to upload. If you use fullversion and maybe even Pc/Mac version, total time is already 1h!

…and what if a few hours later you found another bug and have to recompile? 😀

ok now I guess you understand why a broadband connection is becoming a MUST if you want to do such kind of online business!

The most underestimated aspect of having a indie business is the role of your partner, the significant other. At least for those working at home, is essential to share same goals and to respect the other side work.

But you could ask, what are those “problems” ? Here are some examples:

• doubts about the fact you can make it: this is one of the first obstacles. Unless you’re living in a very poor state, for example where $100/month is already a good income (in this case you should really be able to make it!), the financial problems will be the first thing to face. Rarely your first few games will give you interesting revenues, so there’s a big difference from working with someone that constantly encourages you, or with someone that ask “when you’ll get a real job?” 😉
• problem for the fact that you’re working at home: as you might know, everything that’s “new” or “different” is a sure cause of troubles in our modern boring social life. So, for example, if your partner works all day in office, he/she could expect you to have done certain housework stuff, like cleaning or cooking. Why? simply, because you were at home. Like that meant that you were at home doing nothing! but surely they don’t understand, at least in most cases and for sure when starting and you don’t even earn enough money.
• problem of concentration: as I already posted before… people think that programming is just like a normal manual activity, like washing dishes: you start, you can take a break whenever you want and then resume working as nothing happened. Every programmer knows that this isn’t absolutely true! is good to take breaks from long working session, but it’s YOU who decide. You’re about to understand that very difficult pathfinding algorithm and -zack – “dear can you take the dog out please” or “come downstair, there’s a fun thing on TV” and so on. The best advice would be, if you can, get an office SEPARATED from your house. Your productivity would double for sure.
• where to go living: seems a paradox but the fact that you can basically go living everywhere there’s a internet connection, you could start thinking maybe to go living elsewhere. This is surely and advantage of this kind of job, BUT – be careful – always try to rent first. Buying a house just 100-200km from your hometown, only to realize after a few months that you miss your people, friends, places and so on is really a bad thing. On the other side you could relocate in a completely different country/continent and live happily like our friend svero of Twilight Games 😉

But in ALL the points above, your partner plays an important role. Sometime you have to take difficult decisions, and better be clear from start what your work means and what are the rules – or you could be sorry later and have to take hard decisions (like leave him/her because he/she doesn’t understand you). You can say that misunderstanding happens in every relationship, sure, but as I said, indie business is such a particular kind of work that makes such things happens more frequently than you could think.