What's with these files with a tilde (~) at the end?

[lanjelot]

Mateusz Drożdżyński wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2/12/06, Dave M G <martin at autotelic.com> wrote:
>> how do I get rid of them
> 
> Run this in the terminal:
> find . -iname "*~" -type f -exec rm -rf {} \;
> 
> It deletes all files ending with ~ in current directory and all its
> subdirectories.
> 
> --
> Pozdrawiam,
> Mateusz Drożdżyński
> 

gedit appends a '~' to every file you edit as well if you checked
"create a backup copy of files before saving" in Preferences.

Does anybody know how to tell gedit to store these backups elsewhere ?
In my ~/gedit-backups directory for instance. I know there isn't such an
option in Preferences, maybe somewhere in GConf.