The embarassing truth, connecting the dots, and spreading the word.

I have to admit, one of the more useful things I learnt from my year at CERN was the wonder of CVS, or Concurrent Versioning System. It's a system made so that computer programmers can keep track of changes they, and others make on code. Instead of just saving the file you're working with, CVS saves the file, and the difference from how it was compared to, for instance, yesterday's file. That means, if you thought you were a genious yesterday, but it turned out it was totally useless, you can just go and fetch the old version, instead of changing the stuff back to how it was.

This is also good for my thesis. Not because others are working on my thesis, or that I need to go back and change what I wrote alot, but because it's a pretty convenient way for backup. So even if I didn't really use CVS a lot at CERN, it's coming in handy now.

Backup is nice.

On your computer you have files you work with. A CVS program takes hand of these files, and when you choose to make a new version number, a backup, or restoration point, call it whatever you want, this CVS program uploads the new version to a CVS server online. This server can of course also be run on your own computer, if all you want to do is to systematize your versions, but if you, like me, use it as backup, that kinda defeats the point.

I use Tortoise CVS which is a free and pretty easy to use and has a graphical user interface which is embedded in the file explorer. That makes it pretty easy.



The icons get little CVS icons in the corner to show if they're the latest version and so on.

Most people don't really have a place where they can run a CVS server, but cvsdude.org has a free and pretty easy to use server. They only let you have 2 MB for free, but that's enough for some documents, like a master thesis. If you want to buy their services to get more space, the conditions are pretty bad, so screw that.



I'm not sure what their deal with reptiles is, Tortoise CVS, obviously with the tortoise, and CVSdude with some kind of frog. I'm not too into reptiles, but I don't mind tortoises and frogs. My problem with Tortoise CVS is the sometimes counterintuitive commands, but maybe I'm just misunderstanding something. Commit, checkout, release, remove. Sometimes it's a bit scary, but I think you really need to screw up to delete something from the client software, while CVSdude has the liberating button which deletes everything.

I don't know. If you have just a little data that you care about, and you don't have an easy backup procedure, this could be it.