Scripting FTW!

When you are busy creating your thesis, it is vital to have at least one "offline" backup, and preferable more on different locations.

I’m already putting in several extra methods of making sure my data will be available, no matter what.
The first line of defense would be having a SVN-repository enabling me to have a versioning-system for all documents. This way I could easily revert to a previous version of a document, without having to make copies of the difeerent versions. This is all done by the SVN-server, running locally.
Although SVN enables me to completely recreate all files in the folder "MSC", the versioning doesn’t protect me against data-loss in the "D:\SVN\" folder. Here all SVN-information is stored and when this is lost, all is lost.

This is where my second line of defense comes in: hot-copy.py
As this script is originally written for a *nix-system, it has some hiccups when ran on a Windows machine. I’ve been debugging an hour or so to tackle the problem of reoccurring errors telling me the destination-folder for the backups isn’t write-enabled, or other fatal messages. I finally solved it, and will post the complete script if needed.

In short:

[source:python]# Global Settings

# Path to svnlook utility
svnlook = “svnlook.exe”

# Path to svnadmin utility
svnadmin = “C:/Program Files/Subversion/bin/svnadmin”[/source]