I searched for a standard format for using a date/time as part of a file name and was unable to come up with anything.

 

My question is two parts:

 

Is using a time stamp to enforce unique file names a poor practice?

No, it's fine.

I could get the time from the creation date and serialize the file names (file0001.bak, file0002.bak, etc)

Numbering them sequentially is more work. Think of the timestamp as an increasing but non-sequential numbering.

but just including the time stamp lets perform file operations such as mv 2011-01* somewhere/. Is there a downside to using this type of naming system?

No, it's done all the time.

The format I am using is YYYY-mm-dd_HH-MM-SS.

That's good, because they will sort in chronological order. I would lose the underscore, just because it's easier to type a hyphen.

Is there a better format I should be using?

Not really.

I searched for a standard format for using a date/time as part of a file name and was unable to come up with anything.

My question is two parts:

Is using a time stamp to enforce unique file names a poor practice?

No, it's fine.

I could get the time from the creation date and serialize the file names (file0001.bak, file0002.bak, etc)

Numbering them sequentially is more work. Think of the timestamp as an increasing but non-sequential numbering.

but just including the time stamp lets perform file operations such as mv 2011-01* somewhere/. Is there a downside to using this type of naming system?

No, it's done all the time.

The format I am using is YYYY-mm-dd_HH-MM-SS.

That's good, because they will sort in chronological order. I would lose the underscore, just because it's easier to type a hyphen.

Is there a better format I should be using?

Not really.