Emacs backup files

Emacs loves to create billions of little ugly-twin backup files all over your hard disk that look like 'myfile~' and 'myfile.txt~'. Here are some better alternatives:

- add the following to your .emacs (this is the best solution)
(setq make-backup-files t)
(setq version-control t)
(setq backup-directory-alist
     (quote ((".*" . "~/backup/emacs_autosave/"))))
; otherwise it keeps asking
(setq kept-new-versions 30)
(setq delete-old-versions t)

[i've forgotten which of these does what, but they're all in my .emacs file...]

make sure to create ~/backup/emacs_autosave first. this will create multiple snapshots of every file you edit and store them in that directory. this avoids having all the blah~ files in your current directory, and is useful if you want to revert to the way you had things 5 minutes ago.

- a quick alias to remove them (courtesy of Randy O'Reilly)
alias cleanup '/bin/rm *~ .*~ #* .#*'

- finally, put Dropbox into 'pack rat' mode, so that it stores every single version of your Dropbox files for eternity.