Do you ever do anything that you become pleased with, but it is so technical that you can't explain it to any of your friends without their eyes glazing over?
My wife does a lot of writing using an old DOS-based word processor called Sprint. She has some coordination problems (prone to hitting the wrong key), and has been known to accidently mangle her stories; deleting whole sections, pasting chunks from another story by accident, etc. At some point, I realized she might benefit from a 5-minute backup regimen. I wanted two things, ability to undo mistakes, and redundancy. She would be traumatized by a crashed hard drive. Luckily for her, Sprint saves files essentially in text with some special characters for markup (underline, etc.). It works well with revision control systems, and I'm using git to snapshot her work now. (I previously used darcs, but it became too slow over time). This is my very simple update.sh script. It gets called every 5 minutes from cron. ----- begin update.sh #!/bin/bash cd $HOME/writing # Use the date as a patch name date=`date` # Add any new files git-add * > /dev/null # Commit all changes git-commit -a -m "updated: $date" > /dev/null # get emma to pull changes from us so there is a backup -- need # our address for that since we don't run DNS ADDR=$( ip route show | grep '\<src\>' | sed 's/^.* src //' | sed 's/ //g' ) ssh [EMAIL PROTECTED] "cd writing; git-pull -n [EMAIL PROTECTED]:writing > /dev/null 2>&1" ----- end update.sh Now we've copies of her work on two hard drives, and if she has something get mangled, I can find where it happened and back out that change. -- Don Bindner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----------------------------------------------------------------- To get off this list, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: unsubscribe -----------------------------------------------------------------
