The company I work at doesn't actually enforce any backup strategy, and I'm getting a little bit worried. Sure, we have been working on this particular project for 2 years, and no bad things have happened so far. But a couple of times, I was super close to wiping the entire production database , so I think it's time to periodically backup our stuff just in case.

We have these data that need to be backed up:

• Git repositories

• Perforce repository containing art assets (e.g. PSD, PNG, etc)

• MySQL database

For now, I'm thinking of setting up a Jenkins job that would simply:

• bare clone all the git repositories and tar them,

• clone the art asset repository and tar it,

• put the server on maintenance, dump the production database, and tar it (it's better to setup a master-slave replication so that I can perform backup without taking the database down, but we don't have the resource to setup an extra instance for the slave)

every night, and then upload them to S3, and maybe to some other place as well for redundancy. Maybe every now and then (say a month), if I'm not lazy, I'll put them on a hard disk.

So, is this sufficient? Or am I doing something wrong? Is there anything I should be concerned of?

I'll keep that in mind. Currently, all of our repos are stored in our company's Gitlab, which is installed on a physical server stashed in a dark corner somewhere. Knowing the company well, I don't think it is being backed up.

We are hosting on AWS.

The reason Perforce is used is because the art assets are mostly large PSD files, and I don't think git handles large binary files very well. Git also lacks access control, which is needed for binary files since they can't be merged.

Sure, it doesn't cost much, but if you consider the fact that we're a small team that has a strict budget, working on a project that so far has not made any money, I don't think I'll able to convince my boss to spend extra money on something that we can do ourselves.

But I do agree that it's better to pay someone else to do it for us instead of rolling it ourselves.

It sounds like you're getting a little bit overzealous. Maybe make sure that there isn't already a plan in place for all of this?

There's a real dollar figure for every minute of time you spend doing something, and I'm sure your boss is aware of that.

Anecdotally, I recall for a game I was working on once our animator estimated a few weeks to animate a model of a horse. (We didn't even have a few weeks to spare for that work anyways.) Then we realized that we could buy a pre-made animation for only like $200. We used the pre-made one and saved thousands of dollars as a result, and everyone was happy.