Programming

When your writing a program, does anyone else keep like a million unused versions and backups?

My hard disk is practically full of them!!!!!

 

No not really. I keep the main version and many steps between the last main verion and current version but I delete them once I tested the latest version.

 

Yep I do. I have enough horror stories of my own for not having an older version to fall back while coding. Once in a while I delete all the redundant stuff and burn few major versions on to a DVD.
But you can use one of those version control systems to keep things tidy and compact.

 

Yea - maybe I should delete more stuff or burn it onto DVD or BlueRay when I finally get round to it. I do like horror stories - can you tell us a few???

Do you think I should get a PS3 just to strip the Blue Ray Drive out???

 

Just delete the backups if you don't need them. I've worked on multi-thousand line applications that only took up a couple hundred megs total space. Check the settings of your project under Visual Studio (I assume that's what you're using) and make sure that it doesn't have any strange backup settings enabled. When you change filenames and such, you can often get cruft in a project, from old object files and so on.

And for the PS3 drive, no. It won't work in your PC, and you'll break the PS3, and basically just throw away a lot of money.

 

there is also one of many alternatives in backing them up to another medium (cd, dvd, external drives etc ...) - back up medium r cheap nowadays

cheers ...

 

They are, but why do you want to back up machine-generated files? You can always regenerate them. They don't do you any good, and they aren't used for anything except compiling the final executable. You only ever need to keep around your project files, your source files and the final executables, pretty much. Everything else is just temporary data that serves no final purpose. Your projects shouldn't ever get too large.

 

Just use CVS or SVN or another version control system. And yeah, only save the files that it actually makes sense to save. Source code and project files (or makefiles on Linux)

 

I setup a version of SVN(Subversion) called Tortoise. It has really helped my boss and I keep from over writting each others work. It also compresses the file size so it doesn't take up nearly the space. Plus it's FREE!!

 

You're kidding, right?