Re: Org-mode idea?

[Manish <mailtomanish.sharma@gmail.com>]

  On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 7:51 PM, Dennis Groves (CISG) wrote:
  > Hello All,
  >
  > I am sort of new to org-mode; I have been using it for some time
  > but since I am not a software engineer I am afraid I am not able
  > to make use of all the capabilities nor do I fully understand them
  > all...
  >
  > That said, in terms of life management; nothing even comes close
  > to the power and utility of org-mode in my experience so I use it.
  >

Yep. +1 :)

  > I use org-mode for projects, exercise and fitness, and a daily
  > task-diary.  And I currently do this all in one big giant unwieldy
  > file.

FWIW, I currently split it mainly into personal.org and
my-current-employer.org.

  >
  > I recently suffered a loss of data on my main computer. And as
  > such I really want to get my data into a git repository and have
  > that backed up regularly.

I also suffered a massive data loss last February and lost years of
collected documentation, reports, scripts, email.  I never want to
have to be in same situations again So I dealt with this problem at
various levels.

1. Human mistakes

I have split all my major data into logically separate directories,
turned each of them into separate git repositories (I have 10 main
repos now) and set up .gitignore well.

Managing more than a few repositories becomes tedious quicly so I
resort to using Joey Hess' mr [1].  Also I tend to be very easily
distracted and forget to commit changes even I should have; so a shell
script is fired (by a batch script which is called by Windows
Scheduler) every hour that commits latest changes to the repo (with a
default commit message with timestamp.)

I suspect git is probably not meant to be used this way but it helps
in my case and I do not have to remember anything.  Committing when
you want to is still possible anyways (using command line or magit or
dvc or emacs-git or..)

2. Loss of hardware

Once the script is done committing, it checks if my home desktop
computer is available (when on home network && not on VPN) and then
rsyncs the data (approx. 15 GB of it) to a RAID 1 mirrored pair of
drives (this also happens every hour.)

3. Reinstallations/setup in case of hardware loss

I try to use portable applications [2] where possible and also install
Cygwin [3], Windows native Emacs, Org mode, Freemind, R etc. in a
single directory tree so that I can just copy the directory tree from
my desktop to a new machine quite easily.

Do let me know if you want further explanation of or to look into any
part of the setup.

HTH,
-- 
Manish

1. http://joey.kitenet.net/code/mr/
2. http://portableapps.com/
3. On a new computer, you would need to setup mount points and PATH,
   of course.