As far as I know, such recovery is not yet possible on GDevelop Cloud. This could pose a problem if a user were to delete a project by mistake, or if for whatever other reason they may wish to restore a deleted project from Cloud.
I have moved my own game dev projects onto Cloud, and am enjoying the feature so far! However, the fear of accidentally losing my projects for good, does make me a tad anxious.
If such a Recovery feature could be added, I’m sure it could save many Cloud users from potentially losing their projects, and would spare us a lot of grief.
I doubt it is necessary, because GDevelop does ask a user if they are absolutely sure they want to delete a project. You have type the name of the project–word for word, case-sensitive–and only then are you allowed to delete. I think most users wouldn’t feel like typing that out unless they were certain. However, it is a good idea in cases of corrupted files or something happening on server end, but I can’t think of anything too catastrophic that would require it.
To be fair, it would be a good idea to at least have a grace period of a few days (or months) before truly deleting a project from the servers, so that one could get a project restored by the GDevelop team in case something bad happens (e.g. a malicious actor deletes it on purpose, one deletes their big passion project on a whim because of depression, substances or some other temporary abnormal state of mind, an interface bug, a project being confused with another…). Ideally, this should be implemented as a “trash can” where deleted projects are stored during that grace period for a user to restore anytime before true deletion.
I am just in awe of the idea that some people only have 1 copy of their project. In one place. I’m not saying this is a bad idea to have a recovery program now that I know people like that are out there. I’m just in awe of their confidence. I don’t even make a major change in my project without creating another copy of it to play with so I don’t have to worry about mucking the working stuff up.
When I was a noobie coder, I used to do as you do, and would duplicate my projects before making changes. However, as my projects scale up (become more numerous & more ambitious), I find that keeping multiple copies can become a huge hassle to update & keep track of.
I still take certain precautions, such as duplicating actions/conditions I wish to change. Nevertheless, I would sometimes still duplicate whole projects, should the change I wish to implement be big/risky enough.
But even so, even with multiple copies, the changes made to the latest copy can be SO vast, that losing all that progress can still hurt.
I’m glad we agree that a Recovery program for the Cloud is a good idea, though. You might be right about your approach to caution. I’ll mull it over.
Well I’m not a coder at all I’m just a regular person. I think it is just a different approach of people who deal with that sort of thing for a living and a casual hobbyist like me who constantly worries about their precious. I have copies everywhere haha.
A “grace period” might be something we consider in the future, and also the ability to restore previous versions. For now, it’s just not has been the priority, but could become much more important as more and more users are using cloud projects
I do really REALLY think we need AT LEAST a grace period. A recent topic definitely shows a reason why. Please consider doing this, as it would greatly help some developers.
