You get unlimited cloud storage with your subscription via Trimble Connect. You can publish your models directly from SketchUp using the Trimble Connect toolbar or File>Trimble Connect>Publish Model or Publish As… Trimble Connect will keep a history of model versions so you can go back to a point earlier in time if needed.
You can still keep a copy of your file locally but using Trimble Connect you have separate copies stored off your computer. You can access them directly with SketchUp Go or SketchUp for iPad if you want, too. There’s more but I don’t want your head to explode.
You can share a link that would allow someone else to view the model in the online viewer but they wouldn’t be able to download it. Here’s an example: Link
But these are very heavy files from what the OP once wrote about them, so I don’t know if the cloud is a good solution since opening from disk takes five minutes
Read what I wrote. I was referring to backing up his work by saving a copy to his Trimble Connect account. I think he as already learned to clean up his models as he goes. And opening files from his Trimble Connect storage is not the same as opening them from other cloud storage.
Saul also wrote that he saves manually on a regular basis and before critical operations…
That is a good substitute for autosave and can be done when convenient.
The files range in size from a few KB for things like washers, right through to approx. 100MB for the complete model. They are pretty clean, since I cull out the dross wherever possible, as well as running Purge and CleanUp3. No textures beyond flat colors, and fewer than ten all up. No Warehouse or other third party elements.
Where some files may arguably be outsize is when circles are involved, because initially I believed – lol – they ought to be maxed out on segment count in order to look nice and round. This makes for great renders, but it’s tough on a poor little under-spec laptop. (The big files can take ages to load and open on La Papa. You guys with grown up hardware would not understand these amateur problems. )
Saving happens after every change, no matter how small, which is why there is an entire external drive filled with .skp files, along with a USB stick. Because Life says “critical files gonna disappear any way they can”.
It is wisest not to save to external drives (especially USB sticks) directly from any application, but to use them to make backup copies from files saved on your internal drive. USB sticks also wear out faster if applications are made to access files directly from them because of the constant read/write traffic they create when a file is open.
Yes, the backup files on external devices are copies of the original .skp files saved initially to my system drive. None are saved directly to external devices from SketchUp.
That’s kind of what I do … long trail of bread crumbs eating up lots of disk space. One time my file got corrupted and it couldn’t be opened. Colin and SU team couldn’t save it. I had to retreat to the next oldest version and redo the lost work since then, but at least it was hours, not hundreds of hours. I’m confused, how could you loose everything? All the backups and the backups of backups?
I hate the speed hit of Apple’s time machine and may even stop using it, but it does give a pretty slick ability to go back in time hour by hour of hard drive over time. I have occasionally turned to it.
Maybe an hour or three of work was lost and I rebuilt it later. My backups to that point are fine. It was annoying because I’d had to solve some tricky problems and, just as I’d done it, BugSplat!
There are two ways that almost guarantee a BugSplat on this machine:
flip a cone or a conic section. All those segments moving at once kill the memory. 50/50 the app survives this.
spam Ctrl-Backspace, which is what crashed it this time.
When a certain childish type of user who gets frustrated and angry because things aren’t doing everything (s)he wants it to right now now now, (s)he is prone to mashing keys in the belief stuff will automagically go right. Gotta hate those people!
Nothing like being on a mission, driven and in the groove when you hit a brick the brick wall of a crash. If that doesn’t turn you into The Hulk, nothing will.
You should use TIG’s Archiver script. It creates an Archives subfolder where it saves a copy of the file with date+time onto the filename. You can keep working with Save as usual but from time to time, use Archiver to keep some date+timestamped versions of the file just to be safe if the main file goes corrupt.
It’s free. Of course, if you want to keep your SSD clutterfree, you can eventually erase the oldest files in the Archives subfolder, but that’s just file management.
Right now I manually do pretty much the same, by saving a file that includes the part name and the date+time. After a while it becomes almost a reflex action. Even trivial changes get a save file, because there’s always that instance where a small change inadvertently does something vast and heinous, but you don’t notice until three saves later!
Also, I’ll let you know when this laptop gets an upgrade to an SSD.
Well Saul, I say because it will allow you to avoid typing the date and time each time you save as Archiver does exactly that and more The advantage being that the main file’s name remains the same, in case you use your skp file in another soft (like Lumion, Twinmotion, D5 etc.) and use it linked. All the timestamped files go in another subfolder. Just create a shortcut like Ctrl+Shift+S or Alt+S or like me Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S for Archiver and it will quickly become an old habit.
Spent several hours this afternoon modeling a tiny component. These are the hardest in my experience. It didn’t go well until finally I cracked it and then I was on a roll… at which point I remembered with a sense of dread that I hadn’t saved yet. So I hit Ctrl+S and…
)
The advantage being that the main file’s name remains the same, in case you use your skp file in another soft (like Lumion, Twinmotion, D5 etc.) and use it linked. All the timestamped files go in another subfolder. Just create a shortcut like Ctrl+Shift+S or Alt+S or like me Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S for Archiver and it will quickly become an old habit.