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# How do I back up my source file without source control?

+1 vote
52 views
asked Mar 23 in Authoring by AndrewS (250 points)
recategorized Mar 27 by Alex
It would be nice not to rely on story.bak all the time. Maybe have dates.

- process

## 2 Answers

+2 votes
answered Mar 23 by Juhana (246 points)

For quick and painless backup and version control you can save the entire project to a local Dropbox folder. Dropbox will automatically make a backup of the project when there are any changes and keeps old versions available for up to a month.

If you're on a Mac, it's a very good idea to invest in an external hard drive. Apple's free Time Machine software has been included in all OS X installations since 2007 (OS X Leopard). With Time Machine you can have an automated backup of the entire computer and versions of changed files.

commented Mar 23 by AndrewS (250 points)
I didn't know about this! I'm not surprised it's native. I'm not sure how Windows formally works with saving file versions, but that can be a helpful tool, too.
My justification for the above is that I like to see how I've added source over time--it's a handy way to see if I've been putting something off. Quantity of code isn't quality, but all the same, it's a simple metric that can get me going if I just look in the source directory. I need all the nudges I can get.
commented Mar 23 by JasonLautzenheiser (16 points)
I do use source control, but I also keep it in a dropbox folder mostly so it's available across the multiple machines I use, but the version control aspect of dropbox is nice and I've used it a few times.
0 votes
answered Mar 23 by AndrewS (250 points)
In Windows:
@echo off
set OUTFILE=story-%DATE:~10,4%%DATE:~4,2%%DATE:~7,2%
set OUTFILE=%OUTFILE%-%TIME:~0,2%-%TIME:~3,2%-%TIME:~6,2%.ni
echo copying to %OUTFILE%
copy story.ni %OUTFILE%
In Linux:
cp story.ni story-`date +"%Y-%m-%d-%k-%M-%S"`.ni

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