Folks, this is just a friendly reminder that the beginning of a new year is a great opportunity for you to protect your valuable creativity. In this case, you can do that by downloading any characters you have on the UGO Forums to your local hard drive for safe-keeping. We've had a couple of scares in the past with those boards in danger of going bye-bye, so it's only prudent to take steps to safeguard your characters. The end of a year is the time to be thinking of that kind of thing.
On a related note, you should also take the time if you have it to make both text and image backups of your HeroMachine 3 characters. The change the browser companies made earlier in the year to start wiping out Flash cookies by default was a good lesson that it definitely pays to be safe rather than sorry. So if you haven't been doing it before, load up the text strings of your favorite characters and paste them into Notepad or something just in case. Doing an image export is also a sound idea.
Create safely so you can safely create!
Thanks for the warning. I’ve been going back and saving all my text files. It’s been a real trip down Memory Lane. I laugh at some of the stuff I did.
I can be the example of the dummy who didn’t back up his stuff. I had an issue with my laptop recently, and lost all of my files. 🙁
It wouldn’t be a bad idea to save copies of your Heromachine creations either on a photo sharing service like Photobucket, or on a removable storage device like a Flash Drive or external hard drive ( as well as other important files you don’t want to loss ) In the event of something similar to what Dan just described.
@Dan: I could almost be another cautionary tale too. Some weeks ago I decided to play with chrome and wiped out my files. Good thing that for some other reason I decided to copy all the txts a few days before (for no related reason). Still imagine my surprise when I loaded Firefox and HM3 and found that I had NO saved characters.
Sadly, taking this advice is easier said than done: TIme Machine won’t back up the aptly-named .sol files that HM3 saves to, and after I last had to replace my hard drive, I had to rebuild several drawings from copies I’d saved to iPhoto and Flickr. (I was never, despite Jeff’s help, able to re-incorporate the files from my old drive.) So you’re going to have to make a separate file just for text strings, and keep updating it constantly. Blecch.
Yes, that’s what I am recommending per “So if you haven’t been doing it before, load up the text strings of your favorite characters and paste them into Notepad or something just in case.” Text files, at least you know where it is and you control what happens to it instead of the guys who make Chrome and Firefox and whatnot.
I saw that announcement on the forums the other day- just finished saving the text files of my stuff yesterday. I forgot how many things I’ve done since I last did that!
I always save the .txt’s of my guys, since my browser is by default set to clear everything when I close it (I’m too lazy to manually clear my cookies every few days, or to add the few sites I go on with saveable stuff to the “don’t clear this stuff list”)…
I was a victim of the Flash update massacre of 2011! I still wake up in a cold sweat screaming “Why, Adobe, why?” I now practice “safe” Heromachining and back all my pics up with text. Don’t let it happen to you!!
At the beginning of the new year? This sounds like–oh no–Y2K+12! Aieeeeeeeee!!!!
@ams: “safe heromachining” is hilarious!