squirrel

local history for repos

The problem

When you're experimenting with a piece of code, and all of a sudden, you realize nothing compiles, your tests are shot, and if you'd only committed what you had half an hour ago everything would be fine - that's when squirrel could have helped you.

squirrel watches your project's working directory, and automatically backs up your source files on each change. It scans your .gitignore files so that only changes to your source code are picked up. Backups go to a folder named .backup, and a log of all changes is kept in a local sqlite database for later inspection.

Usage

Wake squirrel up with:

squirrel daemon &

Later, when you want to look back in time, use:

squirrel show '*glob_that_matches*the_file_i_was_working_on.*'

For example:

jelford@clara ~/s/code-squirrel> squirrel show '*server*' | head -n 5
Id   File Name                     Timestamp                     Update Type  Snapshot
171  server.rs                     2017-10-21 20:34              Update       hLL2bfCxlbA3eHzUfIhsC-server.rs
158  server.rs                     2017-10-21 20:32              Update       1HKx22oPdE6Rc4L9wsAJu-server.rs
113  server.rs                     2017-10-21 20:14              Update       Bs1XhewR7kFf3myYJZYMv-server.rs
106  server.rs                     2017-10-21 19:33              Update       O1Tcp0JRNzpZExh9bdTfq-server.rs

It's pretty manual right now, but you can use that list to get back at all previous versions of your file (the snapshots are under .backup)

Advanced

You can see the complete log of all events that have been recorded by looking in the sqlite database:

sqllitebrowser .backup/event-log.db

Being backed by a simple sqlite database means that it should be easy to create custom tooling to help you work backups of your files.