You mean like
Code:
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate$ mkdir t
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate$ cd t
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate/t$ touch wtf.php data.php lol.php
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate/t$ ls
data.php lol.php wtf.php
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate/t$ mkdir backups
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate/t$ cp *.php backups
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate/t$ cd backups
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate/t/backups$ ls
data.php lol.php wtf.php
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate/t/backups$ rm *
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate/t/backups$ ls
barry@{}:~/www/pushstate/t/backups$

Really, you just need working backups if you are just editing a production site's directory recursively. If you break something you can overwrite the bad file with a copy of from the backup directory. Doing this from a full site backup takes too long
