The worth of backups and version control

Some weeks ago my laptop got lost/stolen, which is the reason why you haven't seen any commits from me lately. At the moment I am not able to reconstruct a Gentoo system as I am not home much, but will return in June for sure. At the moment I have no access to Gentoo machines anyway, as my SSH keys are all revoked now (inspite of the good passphrases that protect them, you never know and I won't take my chances). Luckily all my data/work have been backed up to an external hard drive like three days before, so no data were lost, only money. Apart from the laptop, my portable music player, an UMTS surf stick, my loyal calculator and bike lights (which were some kind of expensive, it was Busch und Müller) have now new owners and I am not really confident to get them back. After introducing a weekly backup routine in February, this was the first test case for recovery and it was just successful.

Anyway, for work I am now stuck with a lended laptop which is slow as hell and has Windows XP on it. As I am not allowed to change the disk layout, I installed a Cygwin environment which prevents my productivity from dropping too low (Gentoo Prefix not possible). The work station is a Mac machine and I could avoid it up to now, but my hatred against MacOS grows everyday, my attempts to install a Gentoo Prefix failed due to a bug caused by the network-based home directory. After nagging our great administrator I now have XCode (compiler and friends) on the machine and several other tools you need to make one's life easier. Another thing which I did right was to introduce a subversion-based workflow into our team, which made cooperation a lot easier and helped me recover all my work-data as we put really everything in there. Why Subversion when there is Bazaar/Git/Mercurial? Because people here are engineers, not computer-nerds, so going with a centralized system is much easier to grasp and more comfortable for the IT department as they are in control. For non-programmers there is still a big market for robust centralized version control and the less resistance is there when introducing the more successful you will be, and the application here is a big success story. For myself I still prefer Bazaar, but being realistic and succeed is better than to be (too) idealistic and fail badly.