The sanity of a good 'backup plan' cannot be stressed highly enough...or often enough.

As some might know...I skin aircraft in the MS flight sim...'FSX', and have recently got into extensive/complex and detailed graphics with 'a lot' of layers.

The images are 4096x4096 pixel resolution...so a single bitmap isn't exactly tiny.  Currently the multi-layer sets have up to 57 layers, which means the saved filesize in psp format is a bit over 200meg.

Now that doesn't sound all that big...until you load it into PSP....which reports it as....3392.2 meg....or over 3gig.

Needless to say....when you're loading it you can watch your ram-use graph pop up to a new 'high' [I'm currently at 79% of 12 gig as I type].

This is all well and good except PSP isn't 64bit...it's 32, so just to do this you have to 'remind' it [PSP] to be "Large Address Aware" ...but you're still limited more than a 64bit native would be.

The problem arises WHEN you inadvertently exceed the mem-handling limit and get the quaint error such as "this is not a valid tiff file"....which is good....cos it's supposed to be a psp file anyway....

Not to worry [you think]....I did save it not a few minutes ago....I'll just dump out and reload.

So you do.

AND it's not there.  Yep...you look in the folder where it - er - was and see half a dozen 0 - sized  temp files ....but NO 200 meg 57 layer image.

Nope....nowhere.

You crack open ztree and log every single file....looking for perhaps a quasi-renamed temp you can salvage.

Nothing.

You look a wee bit frustrated at the MANUAL save you did....different name...few days old and think...."not EVERYTHING is lost.....just the past few dozen hours..."

Then you  finally remember just how clever you always were [other than when you forget] .... you schedule AUTOMATIC backups of skinning work....every day....like clockwork [it IS clockwork]....last time saved?  8am.

Today.

I dug it out...stuck it back in the folder where the lost one should have been...and it took about 10 minutes to get back to where I was.

Oh, look.... 7 hours from now there is going to be another save-my-arse-backup happen....

BTW.....while I'm doing it...There's a secondary backup done once a week to a third physical drive.....

Just in case....