been using this cool program securdat for 5 or 6 years.

It monitors folders and stores copies every time you make a change to a file in them. e.g. if you are editing abc.MQ4 then every time you save you will have abc[0001].mq4, abc[0002].mq4, etc.

useful if you make a mistake.

it is shareware but will continue to work in crippled mode... only monitor one folder or its subfolders. If all your code is in one folder or its subfolders, then it works just fine except a simple nag screen when windows starts up.

http://www.pa-soft.com/frameenglish.htm

also, you can use winmerge as a diff tool to see the differences between the files. This is useful if you are trying to figure out what exactly is different between abc.mq4 and abc[0074].mq4

winmerge is also great because you can actually diff entire folders too.

http://winmerge.sourceforge.net/

winmerge is free

note: if anyone knows a program that works like securdat but w/o a nag screen... i.e. freeware then please post a link. But I have evaluated many every couple of years and securdat is the only one I tested that was designed intelligently. It was made by a programmer for programmers.

note 2: if you are worried about space, you can set the number of backups to make. I think it can backup into zip files also, but can't remember for sure. But for me it would be much smarter to just use winxp to compress the securdat backups folder. which is what I do. text files compress very well, so it will save a lot of space.

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Senior MQL programmer:
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cg, securdat does it already as long as you can live with the nag screen upon windows start up.

I guess the main requirement is to only keep 'x' number of copies of each file. for something like metatrader it doesn't matter much since you don't work with too many files but for real programming languages, you understand how big a problem that could be... if you have hundreds of classes.

but why reinvent the wheel when I can give you so much other work to do?

what would be really cool is a program to monitor folders...

I know, sounds completely different - doesn't it?

it would watch a folder and then copy this file to a list of folders. These folders can be local or network folders.

e.g.

monitor c:\program files\sbfx\experts to "other_mt4_clients"

every time a file is added to folder, either by copying into it, or e.g. creating a new indicator, expert, script, etc. or template in mt4 then it would automatically be duplicated all the "other_m4_clients" list folders.

note: chances are this kind of program already exists and I am just too lazy to look for it. Actually the question with these kinds of programs is not whether they exist but if they are freeware and/or general purpose programs or specific to the task.