Back when I started working with computers they were all DOS based so Windows 3.1 was a big step up. It was so very important to save your work frequently and the left handed twitch to Ctrl+S became automatic.

Dave Winer made a cryptic post about DropBox the other day so I went to take a look. Online backup tools have been around for a while but NZ’s bandwidth costs & speed make it unrealistic for now. I tried it on some files over the weekend and ended up with this:

I’ve decided to trial it for smaller files for it’s Version Control and thats working really well. Too well, perhaps? 130 different versions?

I reckon they need to put a throttle on it.

For instance if a new version is saved less than 5 minutes after the last version then it won’t be uploaded until it is 5 minutes old. If the file is saved within that 5 minutes then that version is never saved. I’d be happy to lose 5 minutes work if it meant recovery was easier. Wading through insignificant saves seems crazy.

Ofcourse they’re in the business of selling diskspace, file revisions is just a way to make one file take up alot more room. Its not in their best interest to make the versioning any smarter.