Putting Emacs Backup Files in a Separate Location

Whenever Emacs saves a file, it makes a backup of the original.
So if I had a file.txt and I make changes and save it, Emacs firsts backs up the original to file.txt~.
While I love this functionality, and it has saved me from a pickle more than once, I don’t love the way my folders get polluted with ~ files all over the place.
My blog’s drafts folder had hundreds of these.

Mercifully, Emacs offers a way to stow all these files in one central folder of your choosing.
All I did was add this little snippet to my init.el

;; Set the folder for backup files to a subfolder in the 
;;.emacs.d folder of the user. 

(setq backup-directory-alist 
  '(("." . "~/.emacs.d/file-backups")))

Emacs now stops littering all over the place and saves the backups it creates, to a file-backups folder in my .emacs.d folder.
You can choose a location, you like better :)

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