Fastest way to backup a single file?

Question

I want to quickly create a backup of a file, by creating a duplicate with a '~' at the end, in terminal. Is there any straight forward single command way of doing this?

Answer 1

Create a shell function

backup() {
   cp ${1} ${1}~
}

Put it in your shell rc file, for bash it is ~/.bashrc. Source .bashrc or start a new shell.

 . ~/.bashrc
 backup youFile

And you have a copy of yourFile.

Answer 2

Rsync works Great for backup. It is mostly used for server backup.

rsync -avP <source> <destination>

Here You can defines source and destination. source may be file or directly on local or Remote server/machine.