file management best practices
Dec 20, 2021
Hi, everyone! I'm close to wrapping up my first course built in Storyline 360. It is a nearly 4 hour course that will be updated probably annually as there is a decent amount of data that will change every year or two. I'm wondering what others do to manage their files? I read this excellent discussion recently with a lot of best practices for using storyline, but the file management part is more about what to do during your work. What about when you are basically done with it?
I have saved a lot of back up copies and many, many, many versions. How much of this do you keep and for how long? I have a copy of both the .story file and zip file saved on my computer locally, but once I finished the course I put a copy in our cloud storage as well. In browsing E-learning heroes over the past several months when troubleshooting my own issues, I've seen tons of talk about corrupt files. I'm really nervous we'll go to update some piece of the course in a year and find we can't do it. I'm nervous to delete anything, but also these files are large and taking up space we could use for other things.
At the moment I'm the only one on our staff with an Articulate subscription or any knowledge about how it works, but things change, equipment dies, jobs change. What do you do to make sure someone else is ready to pick up the project and move forward with it?
3 Replies
This is a great question, Sarah! I haven't experienced corruption in about 10 years of using Storyline that wasn't recoverable with my backups. I tend to work with redundant systems with a local storage and cloud storage options. When I'm working projects, I use Dropbox or Google Drive to sync my project folders in real time.
I typically like to keep things local and accessible for the first weeks and months after deployment. This is the time where the most quick changes will happen. After that, I'll zip up the project archive and move that to an archived section locally and in the cloud. Zipping it up saves space and helps with version control since it requires expanding to make any changes.
For group projects, I've started to maintain a Rise project to store the Storyline source. This provides the opportunity to document with additional instructions, uploading videos that document process, etc.. I have also added published outputs as Storyline blocks for context. This can work really well for some projects. It has the bonus of providing a one-stop-shop if you need to transfer Articulate 360 to someone else. You can also password protect in Review and offer a way to capture comments and feedback from development partners.
I asked the question, Steve, and then almost immediately left for the holiday! I'm here 17 days later to say thanks for you response. The bit about the Rise project is a good idea. I think I'll do that.
Steve's approach is pretty sound. I would add this ancient computer maxim "The only people who think they have enough backups are those who have not yet lost data."