I was just about to write the last changes to my thesis when a rather unwished-for incident was uncovered. My thesis source main.tex file was zero bytes long. And since re-installing my Linux, i had not re-installed the backup facilities (which always “had just worked”, so why bother looking at them after the first few peeks). The backup file main.tex~ is likewise zero bytes.

Wee-haa.

Luckily, i had an old backup of the TeX file and a DVI to compare with… Now it’s just a manual, visual diff…