How Filehamster Saved My Life

I don't know about you, but in the course of developing SCL macros and logics I sometimes tend to make bad choices, and undoing those changes can be pretty painful, especially if I went and modified something on a large scale (i.e. adding a call stack on 328 subroutines in an SCL file and finding out that my implementation gets extremely slow as the stack grows).

Thankfully, for the past couple years I've used a tool called FileHamster from MOGWare, which is a free and extremely easy to use backup program that basically sits and watches any files you want it to, and when you change it it snags a copy and stores it for you.  You can add comments to a revision as it's copied or later on (like "Last backup before adding call stack") so you can easily identify the point where you made a change you need to reverse, and restore your file to that version.

Filehamster just takes a copy of what's changed and saves it out for you to a backup directory. But there's very little overhead in setting up a file watch, and with SCL files we're dealing with text files in the size range of 1-300K, so it would take a while to use up an appreciable amount of hard disk space.  If you're that concerned there's a plugin for sale that'll compress each revision for you.

There's actually a set of plugins for sale on their site for extending FileHamster into something more like a full-on source control package, but I'm going to hold out until they come up with a plugin that can hear that voice in the back of my head asking "does he really think this is going to work?"