Hello,
I'm using Visual Studio 2008 Express and I would like Visual Studio (or perhaps an Add-in) to save my whole project to some sort of auto-incrementing archive or whatever would help me recover from disasters. I don't have much need for SVN or complex versioning systems. I'm just looking for something simple and lean.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Jenny
PS : I looked into the built-in AutoRecover feature but it doesn't seem to save more than a few files.
How about just a simple backup? Norton Ghost, for example, will take care of it and version things for you.
Have you looked at solutions like Dropbox? I would give it a try, I have found services like this very helpful when programming. I used to have Uniform server, my source code and version control up in the cloud available from any computer, handy when using multiple machines or you need stuff backed up transparently.
You're describing a source control. SVN isn't hard and takes about 3 minutes to install and configure. A simpler solution would be to create a batch file that copies your entire solution into a backup folder and names the folder by date perhaps.
Source control is an "auto-incrementing" archive or performs that concept.
I use the GIT Extensions Visual Studio plugin to achieve this.
As Shnitzel said: go wit SVN. Depending on the nature of your project and the control you need you might as well look into a hosted SVN. So you can leave the administrative trouble to others. Given the fact that SVN is used quite often it might be a good idea to get familiar with it anyway.
If you want your data to be accessible from anywhere, take a look at jungle disk.
It will do automated incremental backups of any directory you want into amazon S3, at a very low cost.
Most modern (read: non-CVS) source control systems are as simple as you make them. They are pretty much what you describe. All you need to do is set it up (SVN is almost configuration-free these days), and explicitly say "checkpoint!" when you have a version you want to backup. There is no need to have multiple users or integration with bug trackers, etc.
I would personally recommend running VisualSVN - you can download a package that runs a server on your box and installs the client plugin in Visual Studio. Then, you can handle everything right from your IDE.
I also highly recommend git. Since I'm used to git on Linux, I just use msysgit "Git on Windows" from a Bash shell prompt (http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/).
You can get along quite nicely with very few simple git commands. It can be as easy as git status and git diff to see what you've changed, and git commit every time you want to "backup" your work, to get your feet wet. Use a .gitignore file on the Debug and Release directories, and other build-generated files to keep them out of source control.
I agree that SCC is vitally important, but it's not a substitute for a local history of changes on a file. You may be interested in something like http://vlh2005.codeplex.com/.