AAARGH! When File Synchronisation Goes Wrong

I’ve just managed to wipe out half of my latest University assignment. And how did I manage this amazing feat of stupidity you’re probably wondering? Well…

At school I have a place on the network to store files. At home I have a place to store files. I also have a USB pen drive with files on. That’s lots of files and no easy way to copy them around without overwriting them. So I found the rather handy SyncToy from Microsoft and use that to keep everything in sync.

It seems that one day the sync went the “wrong” way and wrote the old version of a file over a newer one. You may pretend there is a long line of expletives just here ->

So backups are great, they stop total data loss. Now what I need is a versioning system so I can roll back things when they go titsup. I wonder how I can do this without there being any manual stage. SVN would work, but I’d need it to automatically update the repository as I won’t remember. I need my home system to always contain all files, in whatever state they’re in.

Tags: backup, Linux, Windows