I've lost everything and I don't know how to get it back. How can I repair my system all I have is a usb with slax linux. I am freaking out because I had a lot of projects on their that I hadn't pushed to github as well as my configs and rice. Is there any way to repair my system? Can I get a shell from systemd?
Versioning is one of those things that you don't realize you need until it's too late. Also, commits have messages that can be used to explain why something was done, which can be useful to store info without infodumping comments into your files.
Why versioning and not backups? I get the part of commit messages, but that's hardly worth the effort for me. If I have a config file which works, I usually keep it that way. And if it stops working, my old documentation is outdated anyway.
you just push the git repo to a remote somewhere and that's your backup
Why do we use versioning for code instead of backups? Simple, versioning is better than backups for almost all text files, since it's a granular backup with change messages etc.
You can ask the same question about code.
I use etckeeper to autocommit changes in /etc as git just has better and faster tools to look at the changes of a fle, compared to backup tools.
It's just so easy to do that there hardly is any point in not doing it.