error: Could not backup timestamp: 'errorfile.bak' already exists

[kanzure]

Was attempting to do bulk (globbed) upgrade of a bunch of mixed upgraded/non-upgraded timestamp files. Some of the already-upgraded files seem to work just fine, but sometimes I run into this error about a backup already existing.

If backup files must really not be tampered with (although for upgrades, it should be a strict improvement over the previous backup file), then I recommend a CLI utility that looks at a directory and finds out which timestamps have not been upgraded, and which ones do not yet have backups, and only upgrade the ones that do not yet have backups.

This can be achieved manually by some crazy shell scripting, but really this should be handled by a good timestamping client.

[petertodd]

Oh, I think what you want is a --overwrite-backups option that overwrites backups if they exist.
It also might be an idea to make the backups just have a date on them, so the actual name is the current time.

The backup mechanism is there solely there as a way to recover from bugs that lead to corruption of a timestamp; upgrades don't throw away data so they should never result in you being worse off than before.