Vim helps protect you from unintentionally losing data by letting you make a backup of the files you edit. For an edit session that has gone terribly wrong, this can be useful because you can recover your previous file. Backups are controlled by the settings of two options: backup and writebackup. Where and how backups are created are controlled by four other options: backupskip, backupcopy, backupdir, and backupext. If both the backup and writebackup options are off (i.e., nobackup and nowritebackup), Vim makes no backup files for your edit sessions. If backup is on, Vim deletes any old backups and creates a backup for the current file. If backup is off and writebackup is on, Vim creates a backup file for the duration of the edit session and deletes the backup afterward.