When I am thinking of backup issues, I tend to strongly separate backupsfrom archives, and in fact I believe that there are two different sortsof backups with different characteristics. Since I think that this is animportant issue, let me explain my distinctions.

To start with, to me the difference between backups and archives isthat backups are for recovering after a system failure, while archivesare for storing data that you no longer keep online. Here, you have toconsider 'system failure' somewhat broadly, so

Since I just looked up the rules on when bash sources your .bashrc (and did some testing), here's the rules on what gets sourced when,for reasonably current versions of bash. Making this more confusingis that bash apparently uses heuristics for some of its decisions.

• login shells do not source your .bashrc ; they source only yourprofile (bash looks at various names, but I just use .profile ).
• non-login interactive shells source your .bashrc .
• shells started by ssh to run