I just ran across a hidden file in my home directory called “.backup” and don’t have any idea what its purpose is. I’m sure it’s benign, but it’s driving me crazy.
I can’t think of what I might have been doing back in May that might have created this file. I thought it might be an archive, but tar and gzip don’t recognize it as a valid tarball. I’ve renamed it and tried several things that might recreate it but nada. Does anyone else have this? Any guess what it’s for? I’m using Gnome 2 on openSUSE 11.3.
As are all computer files ;). But it seems that the groupings of 8 consecutive binary digits (bits), called bytes, when interpreted as characters encoded following the ASCII standard do not give much understandable text. rotfl!
I should say, keep it save under another name for the time being and see if some applications are missing or recreating it. Make a note to delete in a year when nothing shows up and then make a note in your “Things I never understood” booklet.