Make backups of all of your documents

[Peegee]

I just did something stupid: I edited a page using a previous document as a template. Then I saved the previous document as its old name, not as the new file.

In other words I lost what was a very nice piece of work.

But:

1) I had a copy of it elsewhere in a directory where I could have external people load my webpage (hosting it myself)

and

2) I just posted said article in my livejournal

IF I had not done #2 AND I had decided to just host it from the first folder rather than make a copy, I would've lost something that took me a while to think up, and no amount of re-writes would get the same mental charm I had to begin with.

So backup your work no matter what. Also to give this a topic: have you ever lost a great deal of work because of not doing something like SAVING EVERY FIVE SECONDS or like me, accidentally deleting something or overwriting it?

[Meat Puppet]

I deleted my entire school assignments folder because I hadn't named it properly and I thought it was part of some crappy game. That lost me hours of good work all because I didn't bother creating backups. :(

[escobert]

Is this this what you were trying to get me to look at? did I mess PG up? :D

[Peegee]

No you were looking at the backup that I immediately used to replace the first file :D

[escobert]

Damn my evil plot was ruined :(

[Dr Unne]

Also to give this a topic: have you ever lost a great deal of work because of not doing something like SAVING EVERY FIVE SECONDS or like me, accidentally deleting something or overwriting it?

Saving every 10 seconds is a habit anyone will pick up after using Windows for a given length of time. So I've never lost more than 10 seconds of data. I don't remember ever overwriting something by mistake.

vim automatically does a backup of every file you edit, every time you save. You just put this into your ~/.vimrc :


set backup
set backupdir=~/backups

[Peegee]

One of the many reasons I still haven't switched to Linux is due to my rampant game playing. Can Linux play RO? Warcraft 3? Doom 3? World of Warcraft? Will my video compression tool virtualdub work there? And so forth.

But I'm going off topic

[Dr Unne]

<a href="http://chwombat.net/random/screenshots/ro_linux.png">RO running in Gentoo</a>. RO runs faster in Linux than in Windows (God only knows how) but there is some graphical corruption and font problems. Warcraft runs perfectly in wine/winex other than the videos not playing, but it's been a year since I tried it. NWN runs natively on Linux, which is the only other PC game I'd ever play. On the very rare occassions I need to play one of my old PC games I boot to Windows. Doom III and WoW, I don't know.

[Loony BoB]

I've done that a couple of times, but only when I already had backups. If I'm ever going to use another file as a template, I just save it as something else before I even start editing it. Works much nicer that way.

[crono_logical]

I've deleted 6 GB by mistake before when I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing :p Fortunately that was recoverable within one day :p