Software Developers may be very familiar with Version Control Systems (VCS) but few other people are.

Basically a VCS allows you to IMPORT your documents or files into a managed repository. From this repository you can CHECK OUT the documents and files that you wish to work with. When you have completed your changes you COMMIT the changes back to the repository.

This gives you the ability to ROLLBACK to a previous version of a file or document should you need to. In addition when multiple people are working on the same project a VCS is invaluable due to the way in which changes can be MERGED.

I’ve been using Cornerstone as my VCS for a while and I think it’s great. The complexity is hidden away, and lets face it, so it should be ! Cornerstone is a Client for the popular Subversion VCS. Subversion comes installed on Mac OSX but you can instead use the version that comes with Cornerstone.

I now have *everything* (of importance) in my VCS repository. This includes all program code, documents, photographs and even databases. In addition to that my VCS Repository is syncronised via my Dropbox account so that an offsite copy is kept automatically.

I’ve never been happier about the security and safety of my code, documents and data. The tools are available, both inexpensive and easy to setup and use. There is no excuse for losing data anymore.



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Tags: Version Control, VCS, Cornerstone