See topic title. I can't stress this enough. This is something that plaggued the old Omnimaga board a lot and still happens today here. It happened on other boards too. People losing all their project progress due to a crash of any sort, and projects dying because the person did not do any backups elsewhere.

When you program on calc, you're never safe from RAM Clears. Anything can happen. An ASM lib misuse, a teacher resetting your calc before an exam, a buggy Axe program, group corruption, an OS glitch (especially 1.13, 1.17, 2.53MP and 2.54MP), a previous ASM program rendering the calc unstable or even you messing up in your code and not being able to figure out how to revert the changes. All of these can cause the calc to freeze or crash then you lose everything. On the computer, you're not safe from crashes and data loss either. What about harddrive failures, viruses and the like?

Well, backup often and not at one place only. If you program on calc, group your stuff TWICE in a row, then try ungrouping. If you get ERR:VERSION, try the other group. Another solution is CalcUtil and Omnicalc RestoreMem (SE-only for the later and only for 84+ calcs made before April 2007), but do not rely too much on them. Sometimes, you should also copy your progress on either a computer or another calc, then another copy on a USB jumpdrive is a big recommendation.

It sucks to see projects die due to data loss and it feels very bad for the author and also the people interested in the project. So yeah, backup often!

My worst ever calculator project data loss was the "Illusiat 2002: La Quête Ultime" RPG. A MirageOs bug caused both RAM and archive to mess up and RAM clears would fail so I had to reset the entire memory, deleting the entire game.

In my case I had no way of backing up, though. I had no computer at home, no TI-PC link cable to send the files to a school computer. My bro had a calc, but he needed the memory on it so I had to take my backups off his calc.

I stopped caring about anything calc related for the next 2 months after the data loss . The only thing I was ever able to recover is the title screen, which my bro forgot to delete from his calc. The title screen was re-used later in a VB project, modified.

Do you mean OS 2.53 MP? I never heard of this crash before. I know 2.53 is supposedly buggy, though. And that sucks about your project

I won't mention how many times I lost data (only on small, worthless ASM and BASIC programs) by, after losing the original, trying to ungroup the backup I had made and getting an ERROR:VERSION on the wanted file or getting it on a file alphabetically before, causing me to be unable to get the file in question.
So, yeah, not even your archive is a completely safe place.

That ERR:VERSION has happened to me too. Why does it happen? I group a couple of perfectly fine variables, then ungroup it on the same calculator, and it throws a version error. It happened as I was finishing up a pretty complex game after weeks of working on it, and I had no choice but to delete the broken group to free up archive space. Once, however, I did get my files back. I was somewhat panicking when I saw the ERR:VERSION again, and tried everything I could to get my precious program back, including deleting the application MirageOS. For some reason, it worked. Anyone have any idea what's going on?

it's impossible to figure out when an ERR:Version will happen. It seems very random. ALl you can do is group your files twice or three times in a row and hope one of the group will work fine.

It's Texas Instruments buggy OSes fault. It seems like the only good alternative to that is to have two calcs and backup your stuff on the other calc before testing. Sending the stuff to the computer is not 100% reliable, since files can corrupt when sent on the computer. You really need to double-check your backups when you do any, unfortunately

What a waste of Flash...

Why doesn't TI fix their bugs?

Uploading to google code can help, if you know how to use a repository.  Unless we have 1,000,000 hurricanes hit the United States, it's not very likely Google is going to lose your backups.

Or until January 19, 2038.

I think you can recover most of your backup in buggy groups by using GroupTool by Brandonw.