Re: Keeping your history for org files

[Rainer Stengele <rainer.stengele@diplan.de>]

Hi also,

I also once lost a lot of data in org files due to folding and deleting actions.
I only found out several weeks later!

I have all my org and emacs stuff in a subversion (SVN) repository and was glad therefore to be able to get the data back with the help of old revisions.
I also use SVN to work on my files on three different computers.
Whenever I start orging I update from the repository to get the latest files.
At some computers I also do an automatic save and check in of org buffers - in case I forget to do it manually.

I highly recommend to setup version control for Org files.

Rainer


Bernt Hansen schrieb:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Last week I decided I want to keep history of my org-mode file changes.
> I've accidentally lost things in the past when editing folded regions
> and this gives me a way to get back to the old version without requiring
> any extra steps during my normal work.
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> * Background
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> I keep all of my org files in a single directory tree
> (/home/bernt/git/org - or ~/git/org which is an alias to this in the
> bash shell)
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> * Setting up the git repository
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> I set up a git repository for my org files as follows
> 
> $ cd ~/git/org
> $ git init
> 
> I added a .gitignore file so editor backups and export files don't get
> in my repository.
> 
> ,----[ .gitignore]
> | *.html
> | *~
> | .#*
> | \#*\#
> `----
> 
> $ git add .gitignore
> $ git commit -m 'Ignore editor backup and export files'
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> * Creating commits automatically
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Then I added a cron job on my workstation which commits changes to the
> repository automagically.  I decided commits once per hour is enough for
> me so I added the following crontab entry:
> 
> $ crontab -e
> 
> ,----[ My crontab entry ]
> | 0 * * * * cd ~/git/org && git add . && git commit -m "$(date)" >/dev/null
> `----
> 
> and I'm done.  This picks up all my .org and .org_archive files and
> tracks changes hourly.
> 
> If I change a file a new commit gets created on the next hour.  If
> nothing changes no commit is created since there is nothing to add.
> 
> This seems to work great for what I want.  If I accidentally clobber
> part of a file I can get it back from the git repository.
> 
> Here's an example of my current commits made by this setup.  Notice it
> only creates commits when there are changes to save.
> 
> $ git log
> 
> ,----[ partial git log output ]
> | commit a518dc89a51f1740e5c2dfdf11f42ec56b9b3e61
> | Author: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
> | Date:   Tue Apr 1 11:00:01 2008 -0400
> | 
> |     Tue Apr  1 11:00:01 EDT 2008
> | 
> | commit eb8f39383ab043b5be948c2ffe5d268bcbe5985f
> | Author: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
> | Date:   Tue Apr 1 10:00:01 2008 -0400
> | 
> |     Tue Apr  1 10:00:01 EDT 2008
> | 
> | commit 7a33955d889108746e0abb68dea1a3a310902427
> | Author: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
> | Date:   Mon Mar 31 18:00:02 2008 -0400
> | 
> |     Mon Mar 31 18:00:02 EDT 2008
> | 
> | commit eacfe6e2342c89371adb3de5485d6f22271f836c
> | Author: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
> | Date:   Mon Mar 31 16:00:01 2008 -0400
> | 
> |     Mon Mar 31 16:00:01 EDT 2008
> `----
> 
> Regards,
> Bernt
> 
> 
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