Keeping backups of every edited file

Jan 31, 2022

I recently ran rm -rf * in my home directory, which apart from being very foolish, reminded me that I have backups of basically every file I’ve edited:

(setq backup-directory-alist `(("." . "~/.backups"))
      backup-by-copying t
      delete-old-versions t
      kept-new-versions 6
      kept-old-versions 2
      version-control t)

Most of those are self-explanatory, but the long-and-short of it is that I end up with this sort of thing in ~/.backups (for example):

-rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil      593 Nov  7  2020 '!home!phil!.xinitrc.~1~'
-rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil      593 Nov  8  2020 '!home!phil!.xinitrc.~2~'
-rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil      593 Nov  8  2020 '!home!phil!.xinitrc.~3~'
-rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil      593 Nov  8  2020 '!home!phil!.xinitrc.~4~'
-rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil      603 Nov  8  2020 '!home!phil!.xinitrc.~5~'
-rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil      603 Jan  7  2021 '!home!phil!.xinitrc.~6~'
-rw-r--r-- 1 phil phil      785 Oct  6 11:03 '!home!phil!.xinitrc.~7~'

The backups rotate and actually don’t take up much space at all. Just 20Mb for a few years in my case.

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Keeping backups of every edited file