^<@<

Making backups

Now that some progress has been on the scenario, it's time to quickly discuss backups. No one wants to lose months of work on a scenario because they didn't backup their work. It's not really necessary to backup the tutorial scenario at this point, but it's a good habit to backup your oher scenarios on a frequent basis (say, every month, or after each week of continuous work). The simplest way to backup your work is to compress it to a .zip and store it somewhere off your hard drive. Put the .zip file on a USB drive or even a floppy disk. Alternatively, attach it to an e-mail that you send to yourself.

(Wondering what that green checkmark on the pesky folder is? It's part of TortoiseSVN, which is what I use for backing up my scenarios and other work. Among other things, SVN makes it very easy to back up work on a daily basis, and allows you to see how a file has changed over time. Explaining how to use SVN is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but if enough people are interested I could make a separate tutorial explaining how to use it.)

Ready to move on? It's time to learn about scripting.