My financial aid way overestimated the budget I’d need for books. For various reasons, I’ve only had to buy a couple of books for my three classes this quarter (and most of those weren’t required). The majority of my reading has been articles, which means either getting a single reader, or copying bunches of things from the library, or finding them online and printing out the PDFs (shh don’t tell the copy police). Or, like, staying at the library and taking copious notes.
One problem with doing so much research online, though, is figuring out how to keep all the files I download organized, and sync-ing stuff on my laptop with stuff in the school computer hard drive and with stuff I’ve had to download to my nice thumbdrive from other computers. (The paper situation is even worse, but that’s for another post).
One solution I’ve decided to try (after finding the WinXP “Briefcase” feature laughably insufficient – did I just not understand it correctly? Or does it really suck that bad?) is Subversion. I’ve made a repository containing every single data file I’ve needed for the quarter. I checked out a copy of this “trunk” into “My Documents”, and I checked out another copy into my nice thumbdrive. This is very easy because I have the cute little Tortoise SVN program installed, and they add Tortoise-y, SVN-y options in every damn context menu.
So basically, anything I add to either of those directories will be nicely synced over anytime I choose to “commit” and then “update” in the other directory. And, this being SVN, any files I revise (like papers) will be version-controlled and fully roll-backable if necessary, which it probably won’t be. But this, in addition to periodically emailing revisions to myself, should take care of the whole “always back up your data” nonsense (which is only nonsense until your hard drive fails and nine weekss worth of work disappears, never to be seen again).
Of course, right now I’ve only been managing pdfs and articles this way, and I have no idea how the rest of my solution will work out in practice; the papers I’ve mentioned are, as of right now, more or less hypothetical, i.e. unwritten (shh don’t tell my profs), so I don’t yet know how effective this method really is; but the file-ferrying part has been working out well so far. And I will, of course, update you on this when I have something to update you with.
Because I know you TOTALLY care (shhh don’t tell me you don’t or I’ll be sad)!
i care. really.