Why Use a Version Control System?

There are many benefits of using a version control system for your projects. This chapter explains some of them in detail.

Collaboration

Without a VCS in place, you're probably working together in a shared folder on the same set of files. Shouting through the office that you are currently working on file "xyz" and that, meanwhile, your teammates should keep their fingers off is not an acceptable workflow. It's extremely error-prone as you're essentially doing open-heart surgery all the time: sooner or later, someone will overwrite someone else's changes.

With a VCS, everybody on the team is able to work absolutely freely - on any file at any time. The VCS will later allow you to merge all the changes into a common version. There's no question where the latest version of a file or the whole project is. It's in a common, central place: your version control system.

Other benefits of using a VCS are even independent of working in a team or on your own.

Storing Versions (Properly)

Saving a version of your project after making changes is an essential habit. But without a VCS, this becomes tedious and confusing very quickly:

• How much do you save? Only the changed files or the complete project? In the first case, you'll have a hard time viewing the complete project at any point in time - in the latter case, you'll have huge amounts of unnecessary data lying on your hard drive.
• How do you name these versions? If you're a very organized person, you might be able to stick to an actually comprehensible naming scheme (if you're happy with "acme-inc-redesign-2013-11-12-v23"). However, as soon as it comes to variants (say, you need to prepare one version with the header area and one without it), chances are good you'll eventually lose track.
• The most important question, however, is probably this one: How do you know what exactly is different in these versions? Very few people actually take the time to carefully document each important change and include this in a README file in the project folder.

A version control system acknowledges that there is only one project. Therefore, there's only the one version on your disk that you're currently working on. Everything else - all the past versions and variants - are neatly packed up inside the VCS. When you need it, you can request any version at any time and you'll have a snapshot of the complete project right at hand.

Restoring Previous Versions

Being able to restore older versions of a file (or even the whole project) effectively means one thing: you can't mess up! If the changes you've made lately prove to be garbage, you can simply undo them in a few clicks. Knowing this should make you a lot more relaxed when working on important bits of a project.

Understanding What Happened

Every time you save a new version of your project, your VCS requires you to provide a short description of what was changed. Additionally (if it's a code / text file), you can see what exactly was changed in the file's content. This helps you understand how your project evolved between versions.

Backup

A side-effect of using a distributed VCS like Git is that it can act as a backup; every team member has a full-blown version of the project on his disk - including the project's complete history. Should your beloved central server break down (and your backup drives fail), all you need for recovery is one of your teammates' local Git repository.