Comment by andybak

4 years ago

> I use google drive for that personally.

I don't trust any backup that requires me to remember and take a manual action.

> > 3 . changes not yet pushed > > 4. branches that don't exist on remote > Why haven't you pushed them?

Fair point. Because I'm mainly working in public repos, it's psychological. It requires some degree of mental effort whenever I think about pushing something because it's then in public for people to see. I judge people on their public commits so I rather suspect people will do the same as me. "Naming things is one of the hard problems in computer science" - a public commit requires several naming decisions (commit message, branch, deciding "foo" is not a great name for a variable). I sometimes don't want to break my flow to make those decisions. And sometimes that means I put off a commit for longer than I should.

Whereas - my backup happens automatically and continually. It's not tied to my indecision, choices or personal failings. It just works.

So - I strongly recommend everyone uses version control. And I strongly recommend they augment it with AUTOMATIC off-site backups.

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andybak

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da39a3ee  4 years ago

Fair enough, that all makes sense. I do push branches and hope people won't look at them if they aren't connected to PRs :)

> I don't trust any backup that requires me to remember and take a manual action.

(Google drive has an automatic sync client thing like Dropbox so all it involves is having a special local folder where I put documents I want backed up. Or indeed git repos. https://www.google.com/drive/download/)

  • andybak  4 years ago

    > so all it involves is having a special local folder where

    One last point. A backup shouldn't be "a special local folder" - it should be "all files on all drives unless I specifically exclude them"

    • da39a3ee  4 years ago

      I've never wanted that sort of backup in the last 20 years of computer usage. I think it's a bit old fashioned honestly. Nowadays a computer is an ephemeral thing; all that's persistent is files in the cloud, git repos, and provisioning config to get a new machine in a similar state to the last one. And yes I know "similar" there will have made your heart skip a beat :)

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