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Up till now I have been developing my personal and school projects at home without using any form of revision control software to handle my changes and whatnot.

My question is, how feasible is it to use a Version Control application (such as TortoiseSVN) for personal projects I do for myself (and even school projects) ?

Is it worth the hassle of checking in, committing changes and all that routine, just for 'home-projects' instead of just making manual backups?

Links:

Robert Harvey
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Andreas Grech
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    It's much easier to use source control than it is to make manual backups! Maybe it's easier to *learn* how to make manual backups than it is to learn how to use source control. – yfeldblum Dec 17 '08 at 20:06
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    I can recommend VisualSVN, very easy to use. And their subversion server is free :) (http://www.visualsvn.com/) – Svish Sep 28 '09 at 19:17
  • Use a hosted server instead, you get zero maintenance + backup. I use Unfuddle: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/430742/is-there-a-free-version-control-server-provider-for-non-public-projects – ripper234 Dec 12 '09 at 11:38

7 Answers7

192

Completely.

Credits also to http://blogs.embarcadero.com/nickhodges/2010/04/23/39416:

  • Sometimes we do stupid mistakes. Having a source control safety net is a must.
  • Tag important milestones. Even in home development you may want to mark a set of files and revisions as being a specific software version.
  • You train for your professional life. Putting in your head the work methodology associated with using source control prepares you professionally.
  • Storage efficiency. Current source control systems store revisions as a delta difference to the previous revision. This means that it is more disk efficient as the entire file is not stored but only the differences.
  • You have the history for all your source tree. You can rapidly see what was changed and when was changed. Compare files from different revisions and merge easily.
  • You can branch to experiment. If you have some experiments in mind you can create a branch (a new independent development line) and test it. In the end, if you are satisfied with the results, merge it in the HEAD (main development line). You get all this for free without having to create a copy and receive the same benefits from using the source control even while experimenting.
Jorge Ferreira
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    Just one thing to add: provided the version control system is on a remote machine, it provides a simple online backup of your work. – NotMe Dec 12 '08 at 00:29
  • I agree completely. Any time you have to take advantage of a single one of these features, you've already gained back the minor cost of using source control in the first place. – Chris Farmer Dec 16 '08 at 22:53
  • Bullet point 4 is not applicable to git. git is optimized for merge performance, and storing diffs is not beneficial to this goal. these days it's mostly assumed that you have enough disk space for your source code. However all other points are reasons to use any source control and git of course satisfies all of them. – SingleNegationElimination Jul 28 '09 at 03:37
  • Once again I recommend git, especially for points 2. 5. and 6. git has a *very* nice interface for tagging, branching, merging etc. and some of the graphical tools such as qgit or gitk make it very easy to see how all your branches fit together.. it's also a piece of cake to turn your current (unversioned) working directory into a git directory with 3 commands: git init, git add ., git commit – David Claridge Aug 10 '09 at 00:37
  • If your personal project is big enough to make point 4 (storage efficiency) matter, you definitely need source control! – Tikhon Jelvis Aug 18 '10 at 06:11
  • Blog about basically the same thing: http://blogs.embarcadero.com/nickhodges/2010/04/23/39416 – Nick Hodges Nov 29 '10 at 21:41
31

It's totally worthwhile.

Note that you don't have to set up a fully fledged SVN server either. You can just create a repository in the local file system, and connect with the file:// URL syntax. This means you don't have to go through the hassle of setting up an SVN daemon (which is probably overkill for a single user project)

You could also look at lighter weight options such as git that keep all the working files locally without having to even create a separate repository. Git gives you a few more options for how you set up your source control down the track as well.

madlep
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    I recently tried out git because a project I was following used it. I immediately switched to git for my personal and work projects as soon as I saw how simple and *fast* it is. Highly recommended. – Dave Sherohman Dec 12 '08 at 06:24
8

Using source control is also good for backup purposes. If you always check everything in, then you can back up all your source code projects by backing up all your repositories. If you have multiple machines, then you don't have to worry about where the latest version of your code actually is - it's on the repository server.

Greg Hewgill
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I've kept my whole master's thesis under source control - both code and the thesis itself - so I'm a strong advocate of doing this, and not just for code.

For individual projects, the main advantage is the freedom to change things and experiment, knowing that you can always revert back to the previous version if it doesn't work. And it gives you implicit backups of your work (just make sure your svn repo is at the very least on a different hard drive than your main work)

Kena
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Absolutely, it's worth doing. It gives you the ability to try wild and crazy refactorings, and then back out of them with ease if they don't work. It also sets up good habits for if/when you work more collaboratively with a group.

With Subversion (at least) you don't even need to have a "server"- a simple directory can serve as your repository if you access it with "file://" type urls. There's even a free book that contains pretty much everything you need to know to get started:

http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/index.html

Limbic System
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I find that it is extremely helpful to have a SVN server setup because I find myself going back through revisions and other 'throw away' projects because I remembered some function or way of doing something that I could use now. Having the SVN server, I know that the code is stored at home and I can pull it up later.

Astra
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4

Revision control is great because it allows you to be more experimental, knowing that if your experiments fail, you've got something to fall back to.

dreamlax
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