That is nuts! I'm always fighting for the opposite, telling my team to keep all current files without dates so that if the default file you open and you never have to repath xrefs. Or at least throw "_current.dwg" onto the current drawing.
If you want to save all versions, have your backup program do that. We use second copy which could keep up to 999 versions, almost 4 years of work days if you run it every night.
Once upon a time I wrote a backup program for AutoCAD that would automagically backup every drawing, every time you saved it to a backup location.
I'm sorry, I guess my first post wasn't as clear as I thought. That's exactly what this lisp does. It allows us to keep a consistent file name (e.g. "drawing.dwg"), and all of the automatically saved backups are the ones that get the date stamp (e.g. "drawing - 01.23.2010.dwg").
My first instinct was to look at version control software for cad, but we just don't have the money (regional theatre - we'z poor). Our storage sever runs a tape backup every week, but that's pretty few and far between if you've accidentally lost 5 days of drawing work for some reason. SVN and git would work, but I wanted to keep it simple for the others in the office. Keith - how do you like working with SVN for cad? I'm curious to your thoughts on it.
As for file size, yeah - it adds up. Our projects only last about 2 months, and after that we zip the old-files directory for a year and then trash it, only keeping the main working file and a bak.
Also, we tend to treat the .bak files as an immediate backup solution. Other than that, we don't really give them much thought.
