Re: backup-each-save.el v1.1

[Benjamin Rutt]

Kin Cho <ignore-this-prefixkin@techie.com> writes:

> Actually I also wrote some code to backup every file I save, but
> to a single directory (with a timestamp appended to each
> filename).  The backup directory would fill up with a thousand
> files in a month, then I would manually (should write some elisp
> to automate eventually) archive (and delete) the oldest 500 to a
> single zip file.

I think it is OK to have some other means of managing these backup
files.  For me, I don't mind having oodles of backup files sitting
around, since disk is cheap nowadays and most of the files I save are
relatively small (with the exception of e.g. .newsrc.eld which I took
care of in v.1.1 with a user specified filter).  Also, making a
tarball would probably compress really well with all the inter-file
similarities (at least that should be true if you make a complete .tar
file first).  I don't think the .zip format builds a compression table
across files, but rather compresses each individual file separately.

> I've been doing this for probably 4-5 years, and I have to go
> back to this backup directory to recover files quite a few times.
> Also I never had trouble finding the right file to recover, even
> though the directory structure is not mirrored.

I think that is probably fine, but the extra structure sure won't
hurt, especially if you save a lot of files with the same name
(e.g. Makefile).
-- 
Benjamin Rutt