My Troubles with Android Studio - Disaster Prevention/Recovery Tips Request

[JigokunoOusama]

Hello everyone,

I apologize for the text wall.

Background:

I started Android development about six months ago due to C198 @ WGU requiring I create a course scheduling app as a final project for my software development degree. My education has been kind of generalized, so I might be making some very egregious errors in the eyes of many an IT professional.​

Major Problems I Have Experienced:

The first major disaster was that my files somehow changed their encoding and AS did not know what format they had been encoded into. I lost about 3 or 4 months of work because I ended up scrapping all those files.​

The second issue I encountered was with using OneDrive to back up my project. I made the mistake of not closing it out on one of my PCs and I somehow never updated the backup. Also, I was actually storing and opening the project from a OneDrive directory, which was probably not very well thought out.

The third issue I have had is that the virtual devices do not seem to be very stable on my infrastructure. I have had to create new virtual devices due to some eventually failing to start up entirely. Also, I have had issues where my PC crashes due to some sort of memory leak? I'm not sure what else could be causing it.

This last time all my Java files have disappeared from my project folder. I downloaded my project from a repository on Github, as I had pushed the project a few days ago, and half of my files are missing. (settings.gradle, etc.)
​

Does anyone have any tips on maintaining a complete copy of a project while also avoiding encoding mishaps? So far, the only way I have noticed to reliably save my files is to zip the project and email a copy to myself, but I think I grew complacent in the past month.

I am on Windows 10 x64 on an AMD chipset and am using ASv3.4.

TL;DR - Android is killing me. Please send help.

Sincerely,
Andrew

 

[mikedt]

"OneDrive" "Windows"

I'm not a developer, but perhaps try developing for Android using a Linux OS instead, like Ubuntu or something?

Android itself is a Linux OS, and NOT Micro$oft. Maybe use Google Drive instead of OneDrive, because that's Google's own of course.