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 a 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
That's the code. Unluckily I had to delete all my nice comments to post the code nicely here.
ClearAll["Global`*"];
SetDirectory[NotebookDirectory[]];
asfilename = StringDrop[StringDrop[ToString[EvaluationNotebook[]], 17], -6];
asdirectoryname = StringJoin[asfilename, "_versions"];
Quiet[If[DirectoryQ[asdirectoryname], False, CreateDirectory[asdirectoryname]]];
asdate = Take[DateList[], 5];
asdate = Table[If[asdate[[i]] > 9, ToString[asdate[[i]]], StringJoin["0", ToString[asdate[[i]]]]], {i, Length[asdate]}];
asbackupfilename = StringJoin[asfilename, "_", ToString[asdate[[1]]], "_", ToString[asdate[[2]]], "_", ToString[asdate[[3]]], "_", ToString[asdate[[4]]], "_", ToString[asdate[[5]]]];
astimeinterval = Quantity[10, "Minutes"];
asfilesindir = FileNames[StringJoin[asfilename, "*.nb"], asdirectoryname];
asfiledates = StringDrop[(StringTake[#1, -19] & )[asfilesindir], -3];
asfiledates = Table[{StringTake[asfiledates[[i]], 4], StringTake[StringTake[asfiledates[[i]], 7], -2], StringTake[StringTake[asfiledates[[i]], 10], -2], StringTake[StringTake[asfiledates[[i]], 13], -2],
StringTake[StringTake[asfiledates[[i]], 16], -2]}, {i, Length[asfiledates]}];
asfiledates = ToExpression /@ asfiledates;
asfiledates = Table[DateObject[asfiledates[[i]]], {i, Length[asfiledates]}];
asdatecompare = Table[If[DateDifference[asfiledates[[i]], Date[], "Minute"] < astimeinterval, 1, 0], {i, Length[asfiledates]}];
asexp := Export[FileNameJoin[{NotebookDirectory[], asdirectoryname, StringJoin[asbackupfilename, ".nb"]}], EvaluationNotebook[]];
If[Total[asdatecompare] < 1, asexp];
NotebookAutoSave? $\endgroup$