I’ve long been a convert to using ‘Make’ to turn LaTeX into a PDF. However, you can also easily use Make to backup your work as you go along and take “snapshots” of what a draft looked like at a moment in time (see example Makefile below). This complements using both github, Dropbox and some external backup (I might add another block to the Makefile that pushes a snapshot to Amazon S3).

My folder structure for a project:

• writeup (where I store the LaTeX & BibTeX)
• code
• data
• backups (where I store entire snapshots of the directory, w/o backups included, for obvious reasons)
• snapshots (where just the PDF draft is stored)