Inspired by an article by Joey Hess (which I actually read a while ago), I finally managed to clean out my computer and put everything worth keeping into version control. The advantages are worth mentioning:

• Easy migration. I can paint down a basic working environment on any machine I want to use. This can be done without putting any sensitive info on the machine, in under five minutes.
• Backups. I'll always have every version of every file I've created. On a machine across town. This is always a good idea. I've been doing it sort of half-assed, in a way that wouldn't scale to more than two machines and that doesn't keep any history.

Of course, the migration didn't go without some hiccups. The most notable being that I mistakenly deleted all of my homework for the past two years, thinking that I'd already fed it in to the repository when in fact I hadn't. I'd added my high-school-and-middle-school homework archives, then I went off to do something else. When I came back, I was all “Oh, I've done all of ~/school/! I can delete it now!” Then, later in the evening, I blasted away my laptop and sucked down magicked copies from the repository, only to see this message:

[duncan:14:10:30 0 ~]$ svn co svn+ssh://slime5/home/svn/duncan/school/uw
svn: URL 'svn+ssh://slime5/home/svn/duncan/school/uw' doesn't exist
[duncan:14:15:50 0 ~]$

So it's well and truly gone. sigh. Such is life, I suppose. Most of ~/school/uw/ was homework, but some was neat stuff that's mostly gone now; some of it I can recreate but I don't know if I really want to.

And I'm off to the library to get fiction books, so I can hide from reality during finals week. Yay me! I'm so good at studying it's not even funny.

Mood: irritated