Writng-Keeping versions straight

Posted by Cassius
Jul 8, 2011 at 09:46 PM

Jim,

The retention of earlier versions is vital for projects that are important. It is also vital that when one is revising the draft, one revises the CORRECT version. I can recall that on one project, a contractor made revisions to a document that was three versions back, losing all the revisions of the more recent versions. Luckily, I caught it and we had kept copies of all versions.

Before I retired, on important documents, I always added a number to the end of the document’s title. For example, Title001, Title002, etc. It is also useful to include a time stamp at the beginning of each version to help reduce the chances of revising the wrong version , as I just described.
-cassius
———————
Jim wrote:
>Greetings Folks:
> >This isn’t a post about new software, nor is it even about
>outliners or PIMs. I am not even suffering a case of CRIMP. But I do have a question. Does
>anyone have a good system for keeping different versions of a manuscript sorted out? I
>just finished writing a review article for a journal. As I was writing, I kept things
>organized the way I normally do, which is to say not very systematically. Versions
>were named Document_1.doc, and as time went on, things devolved to Document
>_3_revisions.doc. Then various versions of final: Document_4_final.doc,
>Document_4_final2.doc etc. In the end, I had an unholy mess after I added references.
> >
>This raised a question for me-before I start my next writing project, what is the
>best way to keep track of versions? I don’t like to overwrite earlier versions because
>I might go back and pull something out that I deleted in a later version.
> >Do any of you
>have any suggestions as to naming conventions, etc to help this process? Is there such
>a thing as version control software for writing?
> >I thank you for any insights you can
>give.
> >Jim