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Re: st: dangerous preserve
On Apr 20, 2008, at 10:26 AM, Martin Weiss wrote:
I was wondering if anyone apart from me has been bitten by -
preserve-? I recently preserved data, then dropped half my data to
carry out some calculations and later forgot the preserve-status
and saved.
I have no wish to enter a debate about whether the behavior of -
preserve- should be changed (IMHO, it shouldn't), but I wanted to
offer a few comments. Although I often work interactively in Stata,
I would never make important and/or complicated changes to data
interactively; I would make such changes with a do-file instead.
This would especially be true of anything I might need to reproduce
later on, such as changes to a dataset, analyses for publication,
etc. In all such cases, I have one or more "raw" data files (which
are *never* changed) and one or more do-files which make the
necessary changes, all stored under version control (the use of VCS
just came up on the list last week, and is optional but advised).
Among the many advantages to working this way, you'll never "lose"
any important work.
One more thing: I have my Stata configured so that I *always* have a
log file open, regardless of what I am doing (unless I take special
steps to turn it off). This is automatic, so that I don't have to
remember. If you do this, then even work you perform interactively
can never truly be lost, unless you save over your raw files (which,
as I indicated above, I don't believe you should ever do).
-- Phil
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