When editing an existing file with VIM: will it replace or change that file?

Question

I've read that most editors will replace the file when you actually want to save changes to that file How to execute a command whenever a file changes?. So how does VIM behave?

Answer 1

it might depend on various settings related to 'backup', everything that has to keep a copy of the file as it was before the write happened. one of settings that controls that is: 'backupcopy':

When writing a file and a backup is made, this option tells how it's done. This is a comma separated list of words.

The main values are:

"yes"    make a copy of the file and overwrite the original one
"no"     rename the file and write a new one
"auto"   one of the previous, what works best

so, depending on your vimrc (backup set and backupcopy to no), vim might rename a file. when