The other day I really scared myself by almost losing 1 hour of uncommited work. I've mixed up some commands, redirected to the wrong file, even reloaded my buffer and emacs and my content was gone. I eventually found a version of the file displayed in another terminal, but it was closed.
In 2017, GNU/Linux doesn't have a filesystem with snapshots (not talking about btrfs).
So it turns out that emacs can do that. It normally automatically saves unsaved changes into a buffer, but as soon as you save it, you loses that history.
So now I have emacs keep some versions of the file, just it case.
Here's what it looks like. (If you don't have it set, use ls -B to hide all kind of backup files.)
-rw------- 1 8,9K mars 25 16:44 in30.md.~1~
-rw------- 1 8,9K mars 25 16:55 in30.md.~2~
-rw------- 1 12K avril 17 10:13 in30.md.~67~
-rw------- 1 12K avril 17 19:16 in30.md.~68~
-rw------- 1 12K avril 17 19:29 in30.md.~69~
-rw------- 1 12K avril 17 19:40 in30.md.~70~
-rw------- 1 12K avril 17 19:40 in30.md.~71~
-rw------- 1 12K avril 17 19:47 in30.md.~72~
-rw------- 1 12K avril 17 19:47 in30.md
And there's what I've added to my ~/.emacs.d/init.el
;; if you wish to keep all backup files into a central directory
;; (setq backup-directory-alist `(("." . "~/.saves")))
(setq vc-make-backup-files t)
(setq delete-old-versions t
kept-new-versions 6
kept-old-versions 2
version-control t
backup-by-copying-when-linked t)
(defun force-backup-of-buffer ()
(setq buffer-backed-up nil))
(add-hook 'before-save-hook 'force-backup-of-buffer)
