Offsite backup for chess source code.

[jshriver]

Ive been out of sync with this forum for a while, but Im starting to get settled again and would like to resume my chess research.

While reading past posts, Ive seen several people mention the need for an offsite backup for their source code.

If there is enough interest, Id be willing to host exe and source on my website for whoever is interested.

Just let me know can always whip up some web code to do the task.

-Josh
www.olympuschess.com

P.S. Yes I plan to finally update the egtb files

[Steve Maughan]

I use www.mozy.com - it's cheap and offers excellent service

Steve

[Onno Garms]

Why not just hand an encrypted CD to a friend from time to time, e.g. every two weeks? If your house burns down (which for me seems to be the only reason to have an offsite backup) you will have more severe problems than the the loss of weeks' work.

[sje]

I have several USB thumb drives, each of which is capable of holding all of my source and configuration files. One is attached to my main keyring and is with me when I venture outside. I've seen 4 GB thumb drives available for under US$100 and I'd recommend one of these to anyone who has invested a lot of time in their programming projects.

I also use offsite storage, both via the Internet and by physical CD-ROM.

[smcracraft]

I have a Treo 700p with a 4gb HDSD memory card the size of
my thumb.

On it I store my chess program and other critical information.

The Treo never leaves my belt or person...

The unit utilizes Warden and I can send an SMS message to cause
it to self-destruct in the event of loss. If the unit is not turned within
a given period, it also self-destructs.

Self destruction involves ALL data by destroyed.

I maintain other copies and backups on both home systems and
work systems.

It is highly unlikely I could get "taken out" short of a nuclear
blast or other enormous disaster and I'd have a lot more worries
than just chess or data then...

[Tord Romstad]

Why not just hand an encrypted CD to a friend from time to time, e.g. every two weeks? If your house burns down (which for me seems to be the only reason to have an offsite backup) you will have more severe problems than the the loss of weeks' work.

It is much easier to just keep the source code repository on at least two geographically separate machines, and make them synchronize automatically at regular intervals. This is very to set up, and requires no effort whatsoever once it is running. I have simply set up the computer in my office to send a "darcs pull" command to my home computer once per day.

If you don't use Darcs or some other version control software, start doing so immediately.

Tord

[Zlaire]

If you don't use Darcs or some other version control software, start doing so immediately.

Do you have any good information sources where I can learn about using Darcs (or similar) as a single user. Seems everything I found is very focused on multi-user setups where you need all sorts of stuff to make it work.

I just want an easy to manage version control for one user.

[Tord Romstad]

If you don't use Darcs or some other version control software, start doing so immediately.

Do you have any good information sources where I can learn about using Darcs (or similar) as a single user. Seems everything I found is very focused on multi-user setups where you need all sorts of stuff to make it work.

I just want an easy to manage version control for one user.

Hello Jonatan,

I think I started by reading the links at http://www.darcs.net/DarcsWiki. Begin with reading the "Getting started" link, and proceed to read the sections of the official manual which are relevant to your needs. It is true that much of the documentation is intended for multi-user setups, but in my experience it is easy to just skip the parts of the documentation which is not relevant to you. Darcs also has a quite useful and friendly built-in documentation.

You'll probably find that you will only use a small subset of the available commands most of the time. The commands I use most frequently are "darcs record" (to add some changes to the repository), "darcs changes" (to view the change log), "darcs tag" (to tag the current version with a name, which can be used to retrieve the exact source code for the current version any time in the future), "darcs revert" (to undo all changes made after the last "darcs record" command), "darcs whatsnew" (to view all changes made since the last "darcs record"), "darcs pull" (to retrieve all recent changes from a remote repository), "darcs push" (to send all recent changes to a remote repository) and "darcs get" (to copy a complete repository from somewhere else).

Of course there is some learning involved, but it's a lot of work, and well worth the effort. I regret that I didn't start using a version control system earlier.

There are numerous alternatives to Darcs, of course: CVS, Subversion, and many others. Which one you prefer is largely a matter of taste. I've found Darcs to be the most pleasant and elegant to use, but YMMV.

Tord

[sje]

If there is only a single developer, then it may be possible to use the Unix rsync utility as a simple source control system. If you don't need versioning, it does a good job with copying and archiving across different platforms and operating systems.