Programmer's Cookbook

There are many different tools to deploy files or directories of files from server to server. There's tar, rsync, remote copy ... a bunch of things. Whichever method you use, it's in your best interests to make a backup.

To help you keep track of the backups you make at any time, use "date" along with "tar" to create timestamped files:

tar -cvfX filename_`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`.tar *

example:

# find .
./somedir
./somedir/a.txt
./b.txt
./c.txt

# tar -cvfX filename_`date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S`.tar *
a build.sh 0K
a c.txt 0K
a somedir/ 0K
a somedir/a.txt 0K


# ls *.tar
filename_20070103_101105.tar

Now, if you need to back out the tar file you explode you can just go get your previously dated version.