you are probably right on both counts.
What about any of those tools that claiim to be doing backup/mirroring and versioning of everything (including binary files?) at once such as Brackup:
http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Brackup-1.06/lib/Brackup/Manual/Overview.podThere is not much in terms of docs but it looks interesting. To me it looks as though it may do exactly what I need. Except, only when it will be ready. Sigh.
Or perhaps rsync or unison?
With all these tools I know I am going to loose some metadata but I simply don't know which ones I can afford to loose without ill effects.
Any comments on these? I know I will have to cover the backup process separately if I am using rsync or unison. Is there a reason I should not rely on TimeMachine for this?
Re Latex as a writing environment:
Although I am sitting on the fencing watchin the Latex scene with interest, I am more attracted to Multimarkdown even though I am using it in an extremely rudimentary fashion at the moment. The simple reason is that most of my papers are written with one or more co-authors who have never used anything besides Word and are so used to blame the usual incompatibility problems on the imperfections of the tools others use rather than thinking about how this is a self fulfilling prophecy. I can't tell you what I am tired of most, using Word myself or explaining time and again that choosing to ignore the World outside MS Windows is hardly a sign of supremacy. Be that as it may, in my field I cannot count on Latex users around and need something that requires as little paradigm changes as possible.
Multimarkdown is very readable as such and I can exchange test files with Word users and the only thing I need to ask them is to please respect the #'s they may encounter here and there. Well, there is some more markup but orders of magnitude less than in Latex.