In any case, the Drobo does work with, for example, the Time Machine feature of a Mac, which offers versioning.
Most of these are, like SharePoint, intended for company use, but Google Apps also does versioning.
You can see its refusal to conform to the standards of other countries' music industries in everything from the chaos of the Supreme Promotions offices to the reggae tradition of "versioning" - releasing endless strings of records with the same backing track.
Still, whether you interpret this as a bold reimagining of the Jamaican practice of "versioning" endless variations on the same reggae rhythm, or a lackadaisical approach that gives the impression Rihanna has unexpectedly dropped into the student union indie karaoke night, the end result is strangely impressive.
In my terminology, a "backup" is a duplicate of your files — I didn't know that it implied "versioning" (rewinding a file to an earlier state).
Amy Goldstein, a reader from Princeton, N.J., wrote to me that she found all this versioning problematic.
* Someone did produce a replacement versioning utility, AutoHistory for Word 2007 / Word 2010 RC, but I can't find one for Excel.
Microsoft said: "A more robust versioning feature that stores the information for each version separately is provided with document libraries on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites".
Then there's the question of DVD versioning.
However we will be introducing versioning in the near future so that we will be able to do substantial updates with no down time.
The music might not have been anything to do with reggae – Ed Sheeran, Sia and Grouplove one week; Fall Out Boy, TI and London Grammar another – but Questlove's idea of artists, "placed in a position where they have to re-approach their performance and song in a different way" was inspired by the versioning and reinventing that's always been a part of soundsystem competitions.
