Often it's the small things that matter most.

OpenOfficeBackup

What you get

OpenOfficeBackup is written in OpenOffice Basic. The core function has only some 20 lines of code. It runs silently in the background each time you hit the save button and usually doesn't require any attention on your part, apart from changing the backup media.

Don't worry about the data volume such a backup scheme might create. Today's storage devices are huge compared to the size of a typical office document. Even with a fairly heavy workload an ordinary memory card or stick will typically last for months or even years. Should you run out of memory you can save away old backups to DVD-ROM or just delete them. Or you might get some new devices. Storage is cheap nowadays, so please don't be tempted to save at the wrong end.

I'm using the software for about 2 years now and it runs stable and reliably. The conceptual idea, however, is much older. I've been using it almost since my university days in all my development projects and it has turned out to be the backup that saved me by far the most headaches. OpenOfficeBackup is just the port of this idea into the office environment. I publish it in the hope, that it might be useful to you as well.

A quick start guide

Here is a quick overview on how to get a backup up and running:

Uninstalling OpenOfficeBackup

If you want to get rid of OpenOfficeBackup first go to the OpenOfficeBackup Setup dialogue. Clear the default backup name and remove all backup destination directories. This will effectively empty the OpenOfficeBackup configuration file and OpenOfficeBackup will automatically remove an empty configuration file. The configuration file is the only place where OpenOfficeBackup stores data in the file system, so emptying it will remove all traces of OpenOfficeBackup from your file system.

Unfortunately there is no simple way to remove the backup names from all the OpenOffice documents you might them have assigned to. I'm afraid you'll have to do that manually. You can use the OpenOfficeBackup Document Backup dialogue to do this, but you don't have to. You can equally well remove them through the Customs Property tab of the OpenOffice document's Properties dialogue, once you have uninstalled OpenOfficeBackup. Look for the OpenOffice Backup Name property and remove it.

Once the configuration file is removed you can just go backwards through the installation procedure:

That's it.