Script for automated backup of a notebook

Ideas
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1

Hey Guys,

Last evening Mathematica crashed and hours of work were gone, because I forgot to save my notebook. During homework today, I just pressed Ctrl+S every few minutes, to make sure that I don’t loose my progress again. However, after a few more hours, I discovered that my first approach to the problem has been much better. Sadly, I’ve overwritten my notebook every time with Ctrl+S, so my calculations from the morning were also gone.

So I decided to look for an auto-save function for Mathematica. At a coding internship, I once used some software, to track down all changes and create a nice version history, which led me swap between different versions of my code easily. Unfortunately, I was not able to find something like this for Mathematica (if you know an existing method, please tell me!). Thus I thought I could try to write a code to autosave my progress every 10 minutes into a new file.

Basically the code can be used inside every .nb file. It creates a new directory in the notebook-directory with the name "filename_versions.. Every time you execute the code it looks up the current time and exports the notebook into the versions directory with the name filename_yyyy_mm_dd_hh_mm.nb. However, only a new version is created if the last backup-file is older than x minutes (I used 10 minutes for x).

I tried out the code a few times (I simply copied the code to the top of my homework Mathematica notebook). Since I often use Ctrl+A Shift+Enter to evaluate all cells at once I also execute the autosave every time. The result was pretty nice, I had a nice history of my progress in the versions-directory and was able to look up old stuff I deleted in my code.

I want to point out, that I am a beginner at Mathematica, so if you have any suggestions how I could improve my code please tell me (It’s not the most beautiful code, but it works.). I already thought of putting the code into a package, but first I want to try it out more often.

I’m looking forward to hear your opinion on this problem and my approach to solve it.

Best regards,
Tobias

2

Here is another snippet which saves all open notebooks on a regular time interval.
The best place for it is your init.m file.

  1. Use Notebooks[] to get a list of currently open notebooks.

  2. Use Extract to filter (hgo) the ones we want ( every notebook except the Messages WIndow)

  3. Use NotebookSave /@ to save them

  4. Use SessionSubmit to cause this to happen at a given interval

    Off[Rule::argr]; (* Suppress an annoying message. A better way would be a more specific filter *)

    savePeriod=Quantity[300,“Seconds”];

    obj=ScheduledTask[
    hgo[aza_] :=And[ aza[“DocumentType”]==“Notebook” , aza[“WindowTitle”]!=“Messages”] ;

    NotebookSave/@ Extract[Notebooks,Position[ Association/@NotebookInformation /@Notebooks,_?hgo] ] ,savePeriod]//SessionSubmit ;

1 Like
3

Some more ideas.

Preferences setting.

From MSE, this, and this.