.BAK Question..

Posted by Microp on Tue 26 Mar 2002 07:30 PM — 4 posts, 17,322 views.

Microp USA Tue 26 Mar 2002 07:30 PM #0

In smuag/system...

'RIP' selected during login will show screen..
smuag/system/Mudtitle.RIP

'ANSI' selected during login will show screen..
smuag/system/Mudtitle.ANS

'No graphic Support' selected during login will show screen..
smuag/system/Mudtitle.ASC

Question:
For the smuag/system file -- mudtitle.asc.bak
What is the .bak for?

For the smuag/system file -- mudtitle.asc.bak.bak
What is the .bak.bak for?

..What are .baks?

Nick Gammon Australia Forum Administrator Tue 26 Mar 2002 08:10 PM #1

They are "backup" files - hence the name. Your text editor will be creating those. When you edit a file in that directory, it creates a .bak version of the same file, in case you make a mistake and want to go back to the previous version.

If you edit a .bak file with the editor it will still make a backup, hence .bak.bak.

Microp USA Tue 26 Mar 2002 08:34 PM #2

Got it :)

Thanks Nick.

Should I delete these file.bak's to make room, or keep them (just in case)?

What do you recommend?

Nick Gammon Australia Forum Administrator Tue 26 Mar 2002 09:11 PM #3

Well, let's look at it in the greater scheme of things...

Those three files on my system take up 542 bytes.

In my case they are on a 20 Gb disk, which claims to hold 2,212,564,992 bytes.

Thus those files take up 0.000002 percent of the total disk space.

You can safely leave them there. :)

Even if your disk is filling up, you can save that much disk, and a lot more, by simply deleting one GIF or BMP picture or similar (eg. wallpaper files).

These days with disk so cheap, you are better off regularly backing up whole directories, preferably to an entirely different disk, but at least to another directory, so that if you do something silly, like deleting all the changes you made in the last week, you have a fallback.