In order to make it very easy to make a dated backup of a file before it is changed, I have created a script called makebackup. It takes one argument, the file name to be backed up. It either creates the backup file in the current directory, or in a sub directory called archive if that directory exists.

Here is an example of its use (ran at 12:23:40 PDT on 28 Sep 2017):

makebackup H1.ipc
file H1.ipc backed up as archive/H1.ipc_20170928_162340