[ubuntu-uk] Automating find and replace

[Colin Law]

On 17 September 2014 07:34, Gareth France <gareth.france at gmail.com> wrote:
> I do keep regular backups however the issue is that this has been sitting
> silently for some time and changes made since the last clean backup would
> have been lost.

A VCS is much more than a set of backups.  Since the master resides
away from the website the hacks would never have got into the
repository.  But even if they had somehow got there you could find the
commit that stored them, unroll just that commit (and put back any
valid changes made during that commit) and magically your master would
then be fixed without loosing changes made since then.

Even more than that git gives you a complete history of all the
changes you have ever made, so when something stops working, but you
do not notice imediately, you can go back through the history until
you find the point at which it stopped working so that you can rapidly
find what it was you did wrong.

Give git a go, it is trivial to setup and once you start using it you
will wonder how you ever managed without it.  Seriously.  There are
many tutorials on getting started.

Colin