Raymond Zeitler over at Ray on Emacs doesn’t use version control for his “non-public” files so when he had a problem with his .emacs file, he didn’t have any backups except for the single last version of a file that Emacs will make automatically if you have backups enabled. That, apparently, was enough to recover but Zeitler resolved to do better.
What he did was to replace .emacs~ with .emacs.~1~, which causes Emacs to create a numbered sequence of backups rather than simply overwriting the last one. Reading his post reminded me of my backup scheme, which I haven’t thought about in years because all my files—except autogenerated ones—go into Git.
My backup scheme is a little different from Zeitler’s because I’ve set mine to keep only the last two backups. That way, my file system doesn’t fill up with long forgotten and unneeded backups. Even so, there were a lot of backups—some for files that don’t even exist anymore—taking up a lot of space. I deleted them all and started over.
I don’t claim that 2 is the right number for everyone or even for me. It just seemed like a safe number in case something happened with Git. Happily, I’ve never had to use the backups, which is why I’d mostly forgotten about them.
One thing for sure, you need to be religious about either saving your files to a version control system or configuring the Emacs backup system to automatically save some number of backups for you.