On 5/29/07, Russell Jones <russell.jones@cas.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
Carlos E. R. wrote:
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The Tuesday 2007-05-29 at 10:50 +0100, G T Smith wrote:
But you might work all day on a report, and on a stupid moment obliterate it all. We all do such things some times... Or after long work, you decide your last hour has been full of errors and it would be better to go back in time. If the software is designed to save a version history of the file, it might save our day on both cases.
Ummm...
I rather remember a variant of MS Word which incorporated not only the current document but all changes to that document by default. Document sizes suddenly rocketed, and subsequent document corruption due to media limits being hit became a major issue. Also editing became more and more difficult and slow as the document size increased. The response was to turn this feature off.
I remember that. OOo also has this feature. What I talk about is different: it uses one file for each version, with a version field in the file name managed directly by the operating system, not the application program. It is also different from external backup, as it is automatic and continuous, and can be affected by disk failure, of course.
The newer Mac OS X does / will do this, AIUI. Apple call it "time machine". When you turn it on the, e.g., finder window becomes transparent, and you see a stream of windows into the past which you can flip through to get the file version you want. When you plug in an external hard disk and say you want to use it for backup, all the old copies are duplicated to it. I've only seen the demo of this, however.
And in all fairness (yes, this is the wrong list for that, but anyways), Windows 2003 servers have had this feature for long time. At our office we have win 2003 file servers and from the properties of a folder you can access the previous versions of the files. Usually nobody knows about it. It's there. Before Steve Job's time machine. And works. It can be disabled also to save disk space. -- H -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org