Backups are overwritten

[buckley]

If I choose to backup the files by BC it will overwrite them the second time.

It woul be better (and expected) if there was a sequence number appendend like :

file.txt.bak.001
file.txt.bak.002
file.txt.bak.003
.
.
.

And when you choose to let BC backup to a folder it could create a subfolder per action, fe

c:\backup\20091123134622\file1.txt
c:\backup\20091123134622\file2.txt

The following backup set would go to

c:\backup\20091123134702\file1.txt
c:\backup\20091123134702\file2.txt

(the subfolder is a timestap)

Regards, Tom

[Aaron]

Thanks, Tom. I've added your notes to our Customer Wishlist. As a workaround, you should use the Copy To Folder command to manually backup your files to a new destination before overriding them. Our built-in "Backup" options are intended for more simple, one-stage backups of files in case of a corrupt file transfer. For a full backup solution, we recommend using Beyond Compare itself to perform the backup.

[beelsr]

if i had to choose which feature i've wanted the longest in BC, it would have to be a more sophisticated backup mechanism. going on 8 years now.... :-)

a quick read through any distro's _info coreutils 'Backup options'_ and perusal of the source for cp or mv should cast some seed on the fertile minds of developers.

for the past few years, i've used: cp --suffix=.%date%-%random% --backup=simple <filename> <destpath>, which copies file.txt as someplace\file.txt.2010-01-01_nnnnn (since %date% has colons and they don't work too well in filenames :-). BC's fn_time would be PERFECT for this... <hint hint>

The dialog could be re-worked so that you could multi-select options for the rename (instead of the radio buttons you have now): prefix the extension, prefix the filename, suffix the extension, suffix the filename, replace the extension and a destination path. You're essentially providing these now but in a limited way.

It would be oh so much more flexible if they could a> be combined and b> all have the following options: static text or current date/time (as of the operation), the file's date/time or system envvars (would have to work around your hijacking of date & time). The path field would allow the same , as well as .\<something> to be relative to the source directory. Filename collisions could be handled with the pseudo-windows standard of (2), (3), etc... suffixed in there somewhere.

So, using my example above would be a checkbox in extension suffix, with a value of ".%date%_%fn_time% and a path of .\_Archive (which would copy the re-named file into the _Archive subdir of the current source directory).

The next step would be to make the backup settings a per session config option. And if (when?) you add something more sophisticated, a toolbar button to turn this on and off would be needed as well.

Another way to provide the options on an ad-hoc basis would be with the shift-key (or perhaps alt) in conjunction with the keystroke, ctrl-shift-r (for example) would open up a dialog to allow you to set copy-specific settings for that copy before performing it - could include backup options, attribute check boxes (on, off, flip), touch, and all the other regular per-operation sets you have (include hidden, set as session defaults), etc..., as well as the requisite cancel and OK buttons.

[Aaron]

Thanks, beelsr. I've added your notes as well. Building this functionality into BC3 to make it easier and more intuitive is on our wishlist.

As a workaround for more complicated backups, you can perform your backups manually, instead of using the BC option for backup. With BC script, you can automate and use variables such as %fn_time% to help backup into specific directories using the CopyTo command.