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

[Kin Cho]

Benjamin Rutt <rutt.4+news@osu.edu> writes:

> 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.

True, tgz would compress very well.  However, I like zip because
of archive-mode support.

>> 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).

Consider using find(1) (with -ctime option) to purge old files
from your mirrored directory structure.

-kin