I've always made an effort of keeping the things I deem important around, especially if it's something I've made. Sketches from economics class, code I've written, school projects, every piece of email sent or recieved by me (that wasn't an automated reply for forgetting my password, mailing list or SPAM) since 2001 are prime examples. It's good to have around, old projects I can refer to not just to see progression, but to refactor in new toolkits and such.

I guess I'm just living life as some subspecies of electronic packrat. The evolution of hard drives helps. Backing up data like this has historically been a pain. I don't want to waste space (especially when you have to span it across media) on some piece of data that is more or less derivative of other data, or already backed up somewhere else. My programs never get backed up. They're already on the Ubuntu .deb archives. Anyway, a little while ago, when running Gentoo, I liked the way they showed changes in /etc configuration files to me. Doing a diff between the updated version and mine. The wheels started turning. Why not log my configuration files in CVS? I mean, CVS is a great way for making incremental changes to text files.

Later on, trying to back up my email, I came across the same idea. It wasn't until I had ditched CVS and switched to SVN for my code that I found Keeping your life in Subversion, some time before November. So now, with the prodding of Sarah wanting to do something similar, I've decided to put my life in SVN.

So what's the deciding factor of what goes in or not? This is my only remaning problem. What policy should I come up with? Email, code and personal text is obvious. Important dotfiles are there now too, such as my .vimrc and .bash_profile. But at the same time, it would be a waste of space to throw my ~/tmp or some silly dotfile like ~/.Adobe/Acrobat that I don't care about.

So once that's settled, I have a reasonable way of porting my homedir across as many machines as I need. And the nifty part about this will be the ability to travel back in time, and I can physically log into my system as it was X units of time ago.