In this Adobe Captivate video tutorial, I share my best practice with backing up my Adobe Captivate projects as I work on them. I also reveal a hidden feature that might just save you hundreds of hours of lost work and many tears.
Why are the backup files 7x or more larger than the original, and thus sucking up all my hard drive space? (See SS)
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The backup file is the previous version of you project. You may have deleted some content from your library just before your most recent save and that content is still in the backup. It should reduce on subsequent saves.
I got a strange error message when saving a file. The only way I could get rid of the error was to uninstall/reinstall Captivate. Although the file was saved, it also got corrupted and won’t open. Now I have to rebuild my project!
I’m sorry to hear that Alexa. We’ve all been there. I’ve lost days and weeks of work early in my career. Now I’m the poster child for having a solid backup plan.
I learned a good lesson with this experience, Paul!
Thank you!
You’re welcome.
Good advice on backing up Captivate projects. Some time ago I lost hours of work due the application I was using, and my own lack of back up strategy. Now, I back up as I go using a method similar to how you add dates to the filename. You may never need the backup files, but its best to have the backups and not need them than the reverse.
Great info, Paul. Do you use any kind of version control software or system?
Memory is cheap these days so I’m happy to save a fresh version with backups every day. I also have a second hard drive on my office system with Windows File History running. This way there is always a second set of files backed up as well.
Really important to create backups, I think it best to get into the habit of creating your own backups using the date system as this way you have clean backups, with the Captivate auto backup you run the risk of transferring an issue that may destroy both the original version and the backup.
I have literally lost weeks of work in my early days with Captivate. It’s worth the pain in the butt of naming and renaming files.
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