Documentation meets version control: an automated backup system for HTML-based help

Software developers have used version control systems for years, to manage source code changes and to enable them to reproduce any given level of their software from the source code that created it. Most writing departments, however, tend to perform full-scale weekly backups at best or tempt fate by not performing any backups at worst. The two major reasons for this neglect of document version control are lack of adequate tools and the effort required by writers to deal with the inadequate tools presently available. This paper describes a tool I developed at IBM, the Automated Backup Manager (ABM), which attempts to connect the writer's documentation to a true source version control system, without reducing writer productivity.