UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hey guys,

if you've worked in the unix environment long enough, i'm sure you all have been faced with situations where you have to create a backup of a file before you edit it. now the problem arises when your job is mostly all about editing files.

how do you guys normally go about this. say on a daily basis you edit multiple files, more than once a day. meaning, each file gets editted at least twice in one day. obviously, having to "cp" each time you want to edit is a pain.

so what do you experts do to get around this?

thanks

SkySmart.. hello
you can automate the job say once daily by a cron job.
Cron Daemon runs in the background and is basically used for backup. you can put the command say

Code:

find / -iname "*.txt* -print0 | xargs -0 cp /var/backup

as a cron job that executes and will backup all the text files(here I assume you want text files in to a temporary backup directory.
search the man page for cron and find. to look for more options that you may need.
Regards.

thanks a million for your response.
is there a much simpler way to this? something very straightforward doesn't need layers of work like cron, find. something that involves a little bit of set up at the beginning but never needs additional work from the point it was set up and working to the foreseeable future?

hi.
Here are the ten of the best linux backup tools. you can read and deploy as all are free open-source and the most important of all trustable.
10 outstanding Linux backup utilities | 10 Things | TechRepublic.com
check the link. if you need help in configuring feel free to ask.
Regards.