The best tip I can give you is save, save, save! Keep multiple copies of your work at different stages. Maybe you could name the save today's date, so that if you lose your work, or something goes wrong the worst that could happen is you lose one days work. Not the entire project!
Also do NOT keep the only copy on your USB. Back up to your home computer to, so you always have two sources to rely on.
There will most probably be occasions where you will make a mistake, and you realise undoing your work would be extremely difficult. If you have followed these instructions you should be able to open up an earlier (working) version of your Max file and then continue.
Rendering:
After you have produced your storyboards you should have a good idea of how long you want your animation will be. Now think about the amount of of frames per second you will be working to, and multiply that by the length of your animation.
Example: A one minute animation with a FPS of 25.
60(seconds) x 25(frames) = 1500 frames.
A computer will render a frame at different speeds depending on the complexity of the models and the power of the computer. This could range from 5 seconds to 5 minutes a frame! If we continued our example of 1500 frames rendering at 1 minute a frame that gives us a total render time of 25 hours!
You probably will want to produce several renders before you produce your final animation. This is why it is very important to include render time into your overall project timeline.
