Important file lost how to avoid in the future

Had a background job that was outputing log file entries to a disk parbreastion that was nearing full. During this process, I vi'ed an important source file I was working on that was kept in the same parbreastion. While I was in vi, the background process apparently filled up the parbreastion and I didnt' notice. When I completed my edits in vi, I tried to exit with ZZ, and got a "disk full" error. It left me in the editor, but I then :q!'ed out of vi and found that the file I was editing was now zero bytes. Can't recover it as vi didn't "crash," and consequently there was no session file I could "vi -r" with. I wish it *had* crashed when it got the disk error, because how it handled it at that point contributed to the loss of my file IMO.

The "vi" I was using was elvis, the default on Slackware 9.

Is there any way I can force elvis to "crash" on a disk full so that it will leave me with a recoverable session file? Any other ideas of how I can avoid this occurance in the future?

I thought of wrappering vi with a script that essentially does a:

copy $*tmp-vibackup vi $*

and I suppose I could do that, but that seems kinda funky-- any better ideas?

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Sync