How do you manage your work folders and backups?

General Forums off-topic talks
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Hey fellow Krita artists, this is a generic question. How do you manage your work folder and what backup strategy you use? What is your work folder structure? Are there any tips to manage it?

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I separate it into three folders: Assets (things I made that can be reused for later projects: patterns, templates, styles), Reference (things I want to use in my drawings. Includes reference pics or other art styles I like. Organized into folders based on projects), and Projects – which is my main work folder.

Inside of projects, I separate it into sketches, scrap, individual project folders, requests with further subdividing based on patron name, and an archive to move to the external drive once I start running low on memory.

I mostly just used incremental saves as my backups.

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I forgot to write my own strategy, so here it is -

For folder arrangement -

Work Folder
|---> Year (folder older than two year is moved to separate archive disk)
     |----> Client name or project name.
           |---> Raw (has stuff that came from client.)
           |---> Production (Stuff that I create for the project)
           |      |---> project_name_###.kra
           |
           |---> Output (stuff ready for submission)
                 |---> hires
                 |---> lowres

Resource images # all these are tagged and managed by digikam
|--- Photos
|--- Artworks
|--- Textures

For backup - (probably a bit over kill)

  • Backup enabled to save in 10 minuted interval in krita and inkscape etc.
  • Hourly backup of entire disk for last 6 hours with BTRFS snapshot feature.
  • 1 6 hourly, 7 daily and 3 monthly backup of entire work folder with borg to a different hard drive.
  • Weekly manual backup to an external disk stored in office.
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My folder structure is similar to yours. I have a naming system numberofmonth_numberofworkinthatmonth__client__nameofwork to keep them in the order of project creation. And I have an additional tree just for studies and sketches/notes that might be come in handy one day. Sorted by year and named like what they are about.

In addition I have copied my Krita config folders (brushes and other presets) to a folder that gets synced between my devices and created a symlink to them. So when I create a new brush on my desktop, after syncing I also have it on my laptop.

I backup/sync my stuff the oldschool way with rsync with a NAS as intermediate storage. So I always have at least three copies of all my files. I usually do it manually every day before I log out.

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I haven’t changed anything since I started using Krita, but my folder architecture is as follows:
Krita
-Projects by era
–yyyy-mm MonthName
-Finished
–Wallpapers
-Pixel

I haven’t made enough artwork with Krita to require more than that, but I’ve been slowly getting back into using it so this is due to change, especially after seeing how others approach this :wink:

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Month and year folders, unless a project gets big enough for its own folder. I’ll probably update the system eventually, but right now it’s simple and it works.

8

I save everything on desktop with a dumb fast name like aaaasasasasa or wooooowwo. When desktop is full I cutpaste everything to a folder named Krito.

I’m sure a lot of people can relate.

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Honestly my drive for art is only semi-organized by type of project. Gifts, commissions, specific clients, merchandise, studies, sketches, and then a scattering of smaller projects or offshoots. And sometimes I just literally dump stuff in a ‘Misc’ folder.

I backup/save everything through OneDrive Premium, which gives me one Terabyte of storage (nowhere near using it up), and lets me have both local and online saves. I found Dropbox’s plan too restrictive and I needed an Office Suite for work anyway, so it was a nice combo of work + art for less than $10/mo.

(I used to use an external hard drive, with some manual backups on Dropbox, until the harddrive crashed and literally caught fire. Lost a decade worth of art, writing, and photos, and swore I’d always use cloud saving afterward.)

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Mine is incredible messy :smiley:

In ~/Images I have a folder called drawings with all my .kra files. And for each kra file there I have a subfolder with the same name in it are usually the web-ready images like jpeg.

Backup is an external harddrive just with the project files and a storage server.

Tip: you can save a lot of space when you strip the mergedimage.png from the krita file :slight_smile: Krita generates it again when you open the file. Just some thumbnailers can’t create a thumbnail when you strip it.