Keeping your history for org files

[Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>]

Hi everyone,

Last week I decided I want to keep history of my org-mode file changes.
I've accidentally lost things in the past when editing folded regions
and this gives me a way to get back to the old version without requiring
any extra steps during my normal work.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Background
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I keep all of my org files in a single directory tree
(/home/bernt/git/org - or ~/git/org which is an alias to this in the
bash shell)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Setting up the git repository
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I set up a git repository for my org files as follows

$ cd ~/git/org
$ git init

I added a .gitignore file so editor backups and export files don't get
in my repository.

,----[ .gitignore]
| *.html
| *~
| .#*
| \#*\#
`----

$ git add .gitignore
$ git commit -m 'Ignore editor backup and export files'

------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Creating commits automatically
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then I added a cron job on my workstation which commits changes to the
repository automagically.  I decided commits once per hour is enough for
me so I added the following crontab entry:

$ crontab -e

,----[ My crontab entry ]
| 0 * * * * cd ~/git/org && git add . && git commit -m "$(date)" >/dev/null
`----

and I'm done.  This picks up all my .org and .org_archive files and
tracks changes hourly.

If I change a file a new commit gets created on the next hour.  If
nothing changes no commit is created since there is nothing to add.

This seems to work great for what I want.  If I accidentally clobber
part of a file I can get it back from the git repository.

Here's an example of my current commits made by this setup.  Notice it
only creates commits when there are changes to save.

$ git log

,----[ partial git log output ]
| commit a518dc89a51f1740e5c2dfdf11f42ec56b9b3e61
| Author: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
| Date:   Tue Apr 1 11:00:01 2008 -0400
| 
|     Tue Apr  1 11:00:01 EDT 2008
| 
| commit eb8f39383ab043b5be948c2ffe5d268bcbe5985f
| Author: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
| Date:   Tue Apr 1 10:00:01 2008 -0400
| 
|     Tue Apr  1 10:00:01 EDT 2008
| 
| commit 7a33955d889108746e0abb68dea1a3a310902427
| Author: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
| Date:   Mon Mar 31 18:00:02 2008 -0400
| 
|     Mon Mar 31 18:00:02 EDT 2008
| 
| commit eacfe6e2342c89371adb3de5485d6f22271f836c
| Author: Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>
| Date:   Mon Mar 31 16:00:01 2008 -0400
| 
|     Mon Mar 31 16:00:01 EDT 2008
`----

Regards,
Bernt