Be Sure to Back Up Your Procreate Files

1. Introduction: In this class, I'm going to show you why it's important to back up your individual procreate files, how to back them up, and how to recover them. Hello? Beautiful. My name is Trina Brandon, and I have a passion for people and a passion for color. That's why I'm excited to be teaching here. On skill share, I have many identities including children's book illustrator, a surface designer. I license my artwork, I dig traditional and digital. Creating a founding contributor to the Alcohol Inc Art Society, procreate is an essential tool for me when creating artwork, especially when illustrating books. A few months ago I had a multi day ipad issue adventure, the Share function Stop Working, which meant I could not share J Pegs PNG's PSD's essential files that I needed from the procreate app. It was a showstopper for me. Fortunately, I had excellent Apple support that helped me get to a point where I could save my individual procreate files. Which was wonderful because I was not able to use the full recovery for my ipad and had to build my ipad from scratch for me. Procreate files were my highest priority. From that experience, I have started the best practice of backing up my individual procreate files daily in addition to the ipad backup. In this class, I'll share with you how I organize my files, save my individual procreate files. I don't want you to have to go through this type of scare in the class. I'll cover why it's important to save your individual procreate files, how to save and recover individual procreate files, brush sets and color palettes. I'll also share some tips for staying organized and what I learned from my ipad issue adventure. I'll be using an ipad Pro, the procreate app and cloud storage for the project. I'm asking you to try these steps to make sure you see the results for yourself and feel comfortable executing them. Let's get started. 2. Project: Hello, I'm glad you're here. You'll get the most value out of this class. When you try the steps yourself, it's like learning to drive. You watch someone driving. But you really understand when you sit in the driver's seat by executing the steps, you see the results with your own files and get comfortable executing the steps for the project. Please share a screenshot of your success. After you have saved or restored a procreate file, a brush set, or a color palette, simply screenshot it and share it to the project gallery. I'll cover supplies next. See you there. 3. Supplies: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I will be sharing the supplies for the class. I'm using an ipad, Pro Generation two, the Procreate app and Dropbox. I'll also have an I pencil, but you don't need it. You can use whatever ipad model you have that works with procreate. Whatever cloud storage you have access to. The steps will be the same. If you have any questions along the way, please post them in the class discussion. I'll check it often. In the next video, I'll talk about the importance of saving individual procreate files. See you there. 4. The Importance of Individual Files: Hello and welcome back. In this video, I will talk about why you would want to save individual files. A couple of months ago, I had an issue with not being able to share any files from my ipad. This was a huge issue for me because my workflow for my children's book illustrations is to create the elements in procreate and then share the files in P and G form and PSD form so that I can continue working on it in Photoshop, I contacted Apple support and worked with three different texts to resolve the issue. During my ipad issue adventure, I had to reset my ipad multiple times in my attempts to restore the same problem kept coming up. It stumped my top tier support tech, but he was determined to get my ipad back up. And running through this experience, I found that I could not recover parts of my ipad, for example, just the procreate data. It was all or nothing. Luckily, my wonderful support technician got me to the point where I could upload individual files. After that, I had to start over with the factory, reset. I had to reinstall each app, and then I was able to recover my procreate files that I had backed up myself and continue my work. I have now made these steps that I'm going to share with you part of my daily workflow for any updates I make to my procreate files. Let's go ahead and get started with the steps. 5. Back Up Individual Procreate Files-1 NEW: Hello, and welcome back. In this lesson, I'll show you how to back up individual Procreate files. First, you need to make sure that you have downloaded the Cloud storage that you're going to use and you're logged in. I'll be using Dropbox. You can use your finger or an iPencil for these steps. As you can see, I have all of my stacks here. I like to put a cover on my stacks. I'm very visual and I like to see a lot of color and it just helps me recognize what is in each stack. A tip. Set up your cloud folder so that they match your stack name. That way, it makes it easier when you need to recover them and organize them. The first thing I'm going to do is to set up a split screen with my Cloud storage, with my dropbox. I do a split view, I choose Dropbox. This way, I'll be able to see the files being backed up as I go through the steps. This will be the folder on my storage that holds all my backup stacks or folders. I use that word interchangeably. They're folders on the backup storage and there stacks on Procreate, which is similar to a folder. In Procreate, I select one of my folders or stacks that I want to back up. This is called Procreate class and I want to create a folder over here in my storage to match this. I'm going to click on the plus icon and create folder. An efficiency that I learned during my iPad issue adventure was to use the microphone to create my file names and my folder names, which saved me a lot of time. I'd spent a lot of time trying to get the letters right in the little box or to bring up the keyboard and I found this much easier. I'll use the microphone to name my folder. Procreate class. A couple of things I learned with using the microphone is to speak slowly and to pause when I finish my words to make sure that the tool can catch up. Otherwise, your name will be cut short. Now I have my folder in my storage with the same name as the stack in my Procreate app and I want to copy or share all of these files into this folder. Now, one thing I noticed is that I have one of my files named untitled artwork. And I want to name that. One thing I experienced when I was trying to recover my files, I had way too many untitled artwork files which caused me some confusion. I would recommend that you name all of your pieces of artwork, even if they're IMG four and IMG three. At least it has a unique name, and that way, it's easier to keep everything together. Since there's not an image on this particular file, I'm not even sure what's in there. I need to check to see what's in there so that I'll know what to name it. I see these are my notes. I'll come back out here, use the microphone again for the title. Notes. Next, I want to copy all of these files and back them up here in the folder. I'm going to select the files so you can tap each one or you can simply run your pencil or your finger across to select multiple. Next, I'll share. That is the feature within Procreate that allows you to basically export the files out of Procreate. I'm going to select the top choice, which is the Procreate file because I want to keep these files in the Procreate format. So in the event that something happens, I'll be able to continue working on them. I select Procreate. It's exporting and then it comes up with my choices. I want to export to Dropbox and I'm going to look for the folder that says Procreate class, so I need to navigate there. These are at the top, it shows my recent folders that I copy too. I want to go to all files because I know that it is somewhere within this path. I navigate to class backup and then there I see the Procreate class folder that I created, and that is where I want to upload these files. Once I select it, you see the little blue checkmark is next to it and I click on Upload and it says it's uploading to Dropbox. I can see the files start to drop into the folder. So now I can exit out of here and just go back and check to see that I see the names, and they match. And there's seven files, and I have seven files within my stack on Procreate. So then I want to go on to the next folder. In the next lesson, I have a few more things to tell you about backing up individual Procreate files. See you there. 6. Back Up Individual Procreate Files-2: Hello and welcome back, and this lesson will finish how to back up individual procreate files. Let's pick a folder with a lot of artwork. Okay, this is a class actually I took on skill share with Lisa Barda. It's called Kickstart Your Creativity with Procreate 20 Fun drawings for beginners and beyond. Actually, I took this class a couple years after I had been using Procreate. I felt pretty comfortable. I still learned quite a few tips from Lisa. I would recommend this class. In this stack, you can see that I have several files. When you have a lot of files within your stack, you'll want to divide it up again. The first thing I want to do over here is I want to create a folder that matches my stack name. I hit on the plus sign, create a folder Lisa class. Now I have my class. I want to select, I pick ten, and I say share the procreate file. And then I want to navigate to Lisa class. This time it's taken a little longer because it has more files to export. I'll select Dropbox. I'll scroll down and navigate to the backup files back up. Now I see Lisa class. I'll select it and the little checkmark comes up, Upload. And this is going to take a little bit longer because there are more files to upload. Once the task is complete, I go down to the bottom and I see there are ten files. I come back over to my stack and you can see that those are still selected. So I want to make sure that I start from this point right here, but I don't want to download these again, so I need to these and start selecting here for the next ten share. Procreate to take a moment because there's ten files. When it pops up, I select Dropbox, and what I'll see right here at the top is Lisa class. That was the last folder that I uploaded to. It keeps that in the memory, and now all I have to do is select Upload, and it's going to upload the next ten. Once it's finished, you can scroll down and see now there are 20 files. Those are the steps. You would just continue this process until all of your stacks are backed up onto your cloud drive. Once I had everything backed up, I made it a best practice to update any files that I touched daily. That way I knew I had a complete backup of all my procreate work, all this body of work that I've been working on for years now in a separate place from the ipad, full backup. And the way in which I do that is just, let's say in this particular stack I was working on a file, let's say I'm working on the class and I worked on one of my slides. I added something or created a new slide within procreate, let's go to the wrench icon, the actions icon, and share. And choose procreate. Then I back that individual file up to the appropriate folder. I can back it up here, choose the procreate class and back up and save it. The tool will tell me that there is a file name there. Do I want to replace it? Yes, I do, because this is a later version of the backup that I created. I will just select replace and it will replace that file. Now I know that I have the latest version saved. In the next lesson, I will show you how to back up brushes. See you there. 7. Use a Hard Drive to Back Up Your Files: So after I created the initial class, I stumbled upon an information video on YouTube that showed another way to backup your files from your iPad. Depending on the version of iPad that you have, you can connect a hard drive directly to your iPad. I have an iPad Pro which has a USBC connector and I also have a drive that has a USBC adapter, so it can plug directly into my iPad and it's self powered. If you have one that is not self powered or does not have the same adapter, you may just need to get a little converter for whatever connection type you have into your iPad, which many times depending on the little converter that you have, has a slot for power, so I can power your iPad and your hard drive at the same time. In my case, I could plug directly in. What I did was when I plugged it in, my drive name came up this is the same device that I actually plug into my IMAC. I already had a name and it was already set up to copy files from Apple device. So this worked out just fine for me to plug in directly. I didn't have to do anything extra. But depending on what type of setup you have, you may have to do a little research. So once I plugged it in, the name of my device came up and then I could just select it and it takes me right into the file structure. I created one for today's date. This is the day that I'm backing up all my Procreate files, and so I've already started backing up some. This is on the drive side. Within Procreate, I have been selecting files that I want to copy over and it's just this easy. You go into the mode where you can select tap on the stack. You see, I have 29 artworks in here. I can share all these at one time. I select share, and then I want the Procreate format. This will take some time depending on how many artworks that you have within that stack. You may have to wait a moment. Then it asks me, where do I want to export to? I'm going to save to files, and it puts me in the last place I was the last time I uploaded. I want to go back out to my main folder so that I can create the stack name here. What I do on this little folder that has a plus, I select it, and then I'm going to use the microphone to name the new folder, tile collection. And then it takes me right in there. Right now it's holding those 29 items for me, and all I have to do is select Save and it's saving. What I usually do too, what I've been doing is write down what folder or stack that I'm on because depending on how many art pieces I have in there, sometimes I walk away and come back, so I want to remember where I was. When it completes, it takes you right back to where you were so I can deselect that one and then select the next one and just repeat this process until I have copied all of my procreate files. Clearly, this is the fastest and easiest way to upload your files. If you don't have a separate hard drive to do this process, you can of course, still do the Cloud save that I taught you in the original part of the class. But once I discovered this, I just wanted to let you all know because when I find out something new about Procreate that impacts one of the classes I've created, I want to give you that update so you'll be aware of any new information that I've discovered. 8. Back Up Brushes: In this lesson, I'll show you how to save your brush brush sets for my color palettes, I create one folder. Within my backup, I would have all of my stacks created as folders. And then I create a separate folder for my brushes and color palettes. Brushes and color palettes. Now I have the folder for that I can correct the spelling and take out the Or. I can leave it as is. For now, I'm just going to leave it as is. So we can move on with the class. For this part, you can go into any of your files and select the brush which gives you your brush library. And you would have listed here the brushes and brush sets. Procreate any brushes that you've purchased and also perhaps any brushes that you've made. I have here a phase folder that has all my most used brushes. That is the first one I make sure that I save, I selected and then I have some choices. I will choose Share, and then I want to share it or save it into this folder. I'm going to select Dropbox, just as we did with the procreate files. Then I am going to navigate to that folder, go to Class backup, and there I see brushes and color palettes. I select it and my little blue check mark, I select Upload, and then it is uploading to Dropbox. So after a moment or so, we should see it appear in the folder. There it is, faves brush set. You can tell by the suffix there, brush set. It is a set of brushes and not an individual brush. You can also share an individual brush, let's say in one of these files, I wanted to share that particular brush, or I wanted to save that brush, I would just swipe left and then select Share and follow the same path, Dropbox, and then the most recent folders will show up here. I will select Upload. That is the brush that I chose. One tip that I will mention is that I give my brush sets meaningful names, like I do my files when I work on a specific project. And I'm saving that set of brushes, I just make sure that I name it appropriately. In the event I do have to restore it, I'll know what project I was working on with that brush set. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to back up your color palettes. See you there. 9. Back Up Color Palettes: In this lesson, I'll show you how to save your color palettes, which is very similar to saving your brushes. Here we are in procreate and I'm going to select the color icon. And all the color palettes are listed here. There are three little dots that are over each color palette. When you click on those, you have an option to share. I select, I'm going to select Dropbox. Then, brushes and color palettes are here, because that was one of the last folders I was in. Select Upload, it adds it to the folder. As with my brush sets and files, I also give meaningful names to my swatches so that I can know what project I was using those swatches for. Now that you have your procreate files, brushes and color palettes backed up, I recommend that for any files you touch daily, you make it a practice to back them up. At the end of the day, you can use the same names to stay organized. If the file currently exists, you will get an option to replace it, as you saw in the procreate video. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to restore your files. See you there. 10. Restore Files to Your iPad: Hello and welcome back. In this lesson, I'll show you how to restore your files, brushes and color palettes. Here we are in Procreate. We will restore the procreate stack, select Import, and then from your sidebar choose Dropbox, and then navigate your way to the folder. All we have to do to import it is to select the file name. And then it brings it in. It's going to bring in each file flat. Unfortunately, there's no way to bring in a whole stack at the same time. It doesn't take long. You just click on the file and it comes in. After I've imported all the files, I tap select all the files that I just brought in and put them in a stack for me. I like to have my cover slide at the beginning so that it shows up and I can easily tell what's in that stack. That is the step for importing procreate files. Next, I'll import brushes. If you've ever purchased brushes or gotten them free or color palettes, then you are familiar with how to add them to procreate. As you can see here, my paves brush set is not in my brush library. To get it back, I'm going to do a split view again at Dropbox. I'm going to navigate to my brushes and color palettes and choose my fave brush set and then save it to my device. You can do it in Dropbox from these three little dots on the right. It says save to device. I tap that and then I tap procreate. And you can see that something happened here. When I tap on the brush, you can see that it's added faves here at the top. It would be the same process for bringing the brush back in. Next, I'll show you how to recover a color palette from the Dropbox. Select, Save to device, select Procreate. The color will be exported and added at the bottom. I already had the color palette here, and it just added it again. The procreate tool allows for having a color palette, a file, or a brush with the same name. Up next is the class summary. See you there. 11. Summary: Congratulations, you have finished the class and made it through the steps. During the class, we covered why it's important to save your individual procreate files, brush sets, and color palettes separate from the ipad. Back up how to save each type. I recommended some organization tips that may help you. We also talked about how to recover your files, brushes, and color palettes. If there's one thing I hope you take away from the class, it's knowing that you have control over how you can save your procreate data and also how to recover it. Kindly leave me a review. I'd appreciate knowing your thoughts about the class as well as it will help others know what to expect. Also, please follow me here on skill share, so you'll hear about my upcoming classes. Thank you so much for joining me. Take care and stay positive.