Richard Howells wrote:

> I have a question. Out of your multiple copies of everything
> how the hell do you know which one is the latest? That for
> me is the biggest plus to a backup /strategy/. It tells me
> which is the most recent version.

Well, unless you tell it otherwise robocopy will always overwrite older
with newer. It works for me like this:

At work, decide to take something home. Robocopy the whole tree to my
laptop (about 20-odd GB, but robocopy only worries about the stuff
that's changed). Latest stuff is now on laptop. Once I get home,
robocopy the data tree onto my desktop. Make changes to tree. Robocopy
everything off my desktop to my laptop, go to work (optionally working
on the train), robocopy everything to work desktop. It's simple enough
that I can't really get it wrong ;-)

It should be noted, by the way, that I've got a fairly long list of
exclusions: things like .cod, .obj, .lib, .sbr and the like *don't* get
copied and I also generally ditch .zips, .rars and other such choss.

I'd potentially lose my version history (which is all stored in Perforce
at home and Sortasafe at work - but the cable monkeys at work look after
backing up and off-siting the work repository) if my house burned down
but the way I see it losing the history is a annoyance while losing the
lot would be far more gutting.

On a related note, I was playing the "what would you save if your house
was on fire" game with a couple of friends the other day, and the only
thing that was a *must* was Sean's copy of On Peak Rock[1], with the
years of annotations inside it. Sure, there's lots of stuff I'd miss but
the "object" I'm most attached to and which in previous years would be
hardest to replace is my record collection - and that's all digitised
now ;-)
--
Jon

[1] http://www.cordee.co.uk/Books/CP021.htm