>>>>Stupid, but I overwrote some code in a file and want it back like it was an hour ago. No backup from an hour ago and the BAK file is too recent. Are there any utilities like you have on a network to see versions of files? Or, once overwritten, gone for good?
>>>
>>>Gone for good, pretty much. This is a big reason to use source control! Programmers are all human!
>>
>>AFAIK there is a utility, and our network admin once showed me, but I forgot what it was.
>
>It is unlikely programmers will be allowed to use that utility regularly. I've seen such things too, however only source control gives the ability to recover to any point in the timeline.


I don't know that source control (which I would not be without in general terms) would be a silver bullet for me in situations such as Jay describes. I probably went through a dozen modify-save-test cycles today of the program I am developing, but only checked it into VSS at the end of the day. I don't want 200 versions of every program. So if I had wanted to go back an hour I would have been equally hosed.

One thing I do to mitigate all this is comment out rather than delete code while a module is under development. That way it's easily accessible if I want to get it back. One of the last things I do when a module is "done done" (more or less) is use Code References to search for character strings *!* and !!!. The commented-out code can at that point be safely deleted. The strings consisting of three exclamation points (which I think I picked up from Whil Hentzen) indicate open issues or things I am otherwise unsure about. It more or less means "don't forget about this." I know I can use the Task List for this now, and probably should, but !!! is a simple convention that has worked well for me over the years.