Auto-backup your configuration files with Vim — First published in fullweb.io issue #71

auto-backup-your-configuration-files-with-vim.md

Auto-backup your configuration files with Vim

Not using versioning on your configuration files and editing them with Vim?

Use Vim’s backup option to automatically keep a copy of past versions. To put in your ~/.vimrc:

"Turn on backup option
set backup

"Where to store backups
set backupdir=~/.vim/backup//

"Make backup before overwriting the current buffer
set writebackup

"Overwrite the original backup file
set backupcopy=yes

"Meaningful backup name, ex: filename@2015-04-05.14:59
au BufWritePre * let &bex = '@' . strftime("%F.%H:%M")

From now on, each time you’ll save a file (hit :w), Vim will save a copy in ~/.vim/backup/ with this syntax your-file.py@2016-10-25.14:58.

This honestly saves my life about once a year 😁.

Updated answer:
@sql-sith I actually overcomplicated it 😂.

From :help backupdir

• For Unix and Win32, if a directory ends in two path separators "//",
  the backup file name will be built from the complete path to the
  file with all path separators changed to percent '%' signs. This
  will ensure file name uniqueness in the backup directory.
  On Win32, it is also possible to end with "\". However, When a
  separating comma is following, you must use "//", since "\" will
  include the comma in the file name. Therefore it is recommended to
  use '//', instead of '\'.

so you can just add two slashes to the end of backupdir to get the desired result:

set backupdir=~/.backup//
set backup
set backupcopy=yes
set backupext=.bak
set writebackup

and it will look like

%Users%mike%.vimrc.bak

Old answer:

Hi @sql-sith, the documentation can be found here: https://vimhelp.org/options.txt.html#%27bex%27. (Same as :help bex)

https://vimhelp.org/builtin.txt.html#expand%28%29 (:help expand) has the information regarding the meaning of %.

Since this is the extension that is used, you can append to the filename. Something like this should help you:

:echo substitute(expand('%:p'), '/', '%', 'g').'@'.strftime("%F.%H:%M")

%Users%mike%.bashrc@2023-02-02.20:17 

The file would end up looking like this:

.bashrc%Users%mike%.bashrc@2023-02-02.20:17

Its really awesome solution but eventually one will have to manually delete the older backup. is there a way to delete the files older than 7-14 days while initialising vim?

maybe something like this could help:

silent execute '!find $HOME/.vimtmp/backup -type f -mtime +7 -delete'