USB Pen Drive User

[Andrew Cowie]

On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 09:03, David Colebatch wrote: 
> The subversion method is great (i might look into it) as it allows you to use 
> thin clients, where USB etc. isn't available/supported.
> 
> Not to mention having an "offsite" backup :)

I've been using subversion to store my home directory for a little over
a year. My primary interest was the ability to move files back and forth
between work desktop, home desktop, and laptop - but along the way you
start getting the best backups of all - distributed fully usable live
ones.

It's a little tricky when you run your *entire* home directory on it.
You have to be careful about setting the svn:ignore properties to 
exclude many of the . directories, for example. But, having things like
.bash_profile, .bashrc and ~/bin survive from system to system is
tremendously handy - and gets one up to speed rapidly on a new machine.

Frankly, a better solution is probably to NOT do your entire home
directory under subversion (or CVS or arch or darcs or whatever) and
instead only do specific things that are of interest and appropriate to
revision control - for example, Documents/, src/, TODO, etc.

Someone pointed out to me a few months ago that a good middle ground is
to create something like dotfiles/ and symlink things in there to the
appropriate .bashrc, .gaim/, etc in your home directory as appropriate.
There are one or two things that can come up as some programs don't
traverse symlinks properly, but I'm sure its not a huge deal.

I'm probably going to switch to that way of doing things at some point
in the future.

> You'd be screwed if you lost your USB pen :p

While version *history* is overkill for most files, having the ability
to at least to back out to the previous version if you're messing with
(or accidentally delete) something - and, if you find yourself needing
the full power and wealth of versions, branches, merging, history,
sharing, etc you've got it at your fingertips.

AfC
Toronto

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd

Canada: (416) 848 6072

http://www.operationaldynamics.com/
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