Feature Suggestion: Change Tracking / Auto Backup

[nemoby]

I use source control for many reasons but one of these is to provide an off site (at least off of my desktop / laptop) backup of the work that I have in progress. To this extent, I feel good checking in all my work at the end of the day before leaving the office with my laptop in tow. But when working on a shared project or library, I can't check in changes that would break the build and thus I can't "backup" my work. Enough said.

It would be pretty nice if Vault could maintain a silent behind the scene set of time based, automatic, journal "check-ins" (for lack of a better word). These entries would only apply to the current user and not the repository as a whole. They could work with either Check-Out, Edit, Check-In modes or Edit, Merge, Commit. The frequency would be user definable (I would be happy with every 20 minutes) and obviously only work when I am On-Line.

I guess these entries could be gettable / mergable across different machines assuming I connect to Vault with the same account. Code at the office. Get the non-committed changes so I can continue working on them at home. You could take this a step further and allow for uncommited gets and merges within groups of users.

History and Diffs should only be available to the current user (no big brother please) and history could be deleted once the actual Check-In occurs.

Just a casual thought....

[lbauer]

What you're describing is similar to a feature called "shelving," where users checkin changes, but they don't go into production, just into the user's space in the repository. I don't think it includes automated backups, but that's a good idea.

I'll add your "vote" and you suggestions to the feature request.

[nemoby]

Linda,

I did a bit of reading and I think "shelving" is a resonable stab at what I would like to see. Maybe a good way of adding the "backup" part would be to include a feature that shelves(?) my file automatically when I save it locally.

[lbauer]

Done.