Excuse the title, but seriously, everyone needs to learn a lesson from me today. I had a deadline to hand an essay in by 4pm today, and all I had left to do was polish (e.g. replacing bad transliterations with proper Hebrew, tidy the references up) and I completed it all by 11am. Grabbed my computer, headed into campus to check one detail with my tutor and print the essay off, and what did I find when I opened the file!? All that was left was the bibliography! The rest of the essay had vanished. My most recent backup was taken when the essay was only 1/4 done, and I only had a few hours left before the deadline. Ultimately, I got a really shoddy version handed in, don’t really want to think about what the grade will be like.
How did this situation even occur though? Yeah, I should back up more regularly (I was using Dropbox with a symlink, which is where my most recent backup was but disabled that ‘cos it was throwing up an SELinux warning everytime I logged in – very annoying), but what about how the file contents went missing in the first place?
I can’t believe I accidentally deleted it, although I guess that’s possible. I guess it’s also possible that there’s some hideous bug in OpenOffice.org 3, but I have no idea how I’d reproduce it; this could be linked to the fact that the past few times I opened and closed it before the contents went missing it used the recovery feature rather than just plain old opening the file. But even if that’s the case, why don’t we have some kind of revision control built into our file systems? Maybe I should start keeping my home directory in git or something…
Gargh.
Brighter news, I know I haven’t been very active in Fedora lately (see the essay above + reading + note taking + general life), but a couple of people have stepped forward and offered to help with FM. It’s way too much for me to produce by myself, so hopefully with their help we’ll be able to form something a bit more sustainable.
Also, bonfires rock (remember, remember, the 5th November 
). Glad Barack won, hoping he won’t let everyone down, although I realise it will be tougher given the current mess that the world is in. Would like to visit the US some time to get a feel for what it’s actually like as a country now, get past my overly cynical imaginings.
6 Comments
How about using LaTeX? Things like this would not happen then…
Sorry man, that really sucks. We’ll still hire you though, we don’t care what grade you get on that essay.
>why don’t we have some kind of revision control built into our file systems?
Good question. VMS had it ages ago.
Home in Git has worked out really well for me. It (and previously, svn) has saved me on several occasions, and it can also be a nice way to sync between eg a laptop and a desktop. I don’t know how much you know about VCS home, but besides Joey Hess’s article [1], there is also a VCS Home wiki [2] and mailing list [3].
[1] http://kitenet.net/~joey/svnhome/
[2] http://www.theficks.name/VCS-Home/HomePage
[3] http://lists.madduck.net/mailman/listinfo/vcs-home
And why in the world you would need to have whole $HOME in git? Just use the tool as it was intended to be used —
git initin the root directory of your project is enough.The real problem here is the inability with the current file system to recover deleted files.
>And why in the world you would need to have whole $HOME in git? Just use the tool as it was intended to be used — git init in the root directory of your project is enough.
Why deal with a myriad of very small repos, when you can have one? If you don’t want to track your dotfiles, you could just make a repo for ~/doc/, or whatever you use. I actually have one repo for ~/doc/, and one for the rest of ~