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I want to use a versioning system to back up and track my changes but I'm too lazy to check out/check in, merge, commit, etc. I don't want to branch, fork or anything else. I just want to be able to see what files have changes and what my Main() looked like last week.

So I'm looking for an application that will simply take my Visual Studio projects folder and back it up in such a way that all prior versions of the files are preserved so I can not only have a backup, but I can easily see how the file looked at some point in the past without me having to explicitly put it in a repository, update/commit/merge/etc.

Basically what I'm looking for is dropbox's functionality but on my local machine and without the 30 day limitation of prior versions.

Does such an application exist?

powlette
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    This looks similar to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7060769/dropbox-style-svn-git-mercurial-auto-commit-upon-change-and-auto-checkout . With Mercurial and Tortoise HG you can get really easy source control but you still have to explicitly say you want to commit. You could obviously schedule this to happen but what would be the point? The commits are really helpful in day to day development, testing and roll back. If you do that intentionally you have a really useful tracking system, if you automate it then you are going to have a arbitary set of commits with meaningless messages. – AlexC Dec 08 '11 at 21:27
  • Exactly why I don't want to use Mercirial or Tortoise. All I want is dropbox's functionality - that would give me the piece of mind of a back and the ability to do a compare with absolutely no effort. – powlette Dec 08 '11 at 21:37

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As AlexC stated, I highly doubt that the little bit of work you save by not using a version control system explicitly is worth the drawbacks, but anyway:

  • Simplest idea: Just write a wrapper script that checks out the HEAD of your repository, starts Visual Studio and commits everything to version control after you close it.

  • Alternatively, just trigger commits every hour. With most VCSes, non-modified files won't show up in the listing of modified files.

jstarek
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  • "ust write a wrapper script that checks out the HEAD o..." You forget, I'm lazy. If I wanted to put in that much effort, I'd use subversion. – powlette Dec 08 '11 at 21:41