Any time you want to be able to keep track of all the aspects of a project, particularly to be able to roll back the state of a set of files to a previous version, you want to use version control software of some sort.
This type of application is particularly important to software developers of all types, but I believe it can be very useful for non-programmers who need (or want) to keep track of what they’ve been doing over time in various projects.
The most fashionable of the version control systems available these days would have to be Gitwritten as a set of small utilities that can be plugged together to do everything necessary to version control. It’s also distributed so you don’t necessarily need to depend on a single server to work with project files.
This is mostly a list of links to good Git resources that I’ve found, so far:
- Pro Git is an online version of an actual book, Pro Git
, by Scott Chacon, that’s gotten a lot of good reviews.
- Git Reference, which is what it says it is, by the Github people (see below).
- This item from Reddit, Using Dropbox as a Git repository actually points to a Stackoverflow item, Using git+dropbox together effectively?. Both those items included lots of good discussions of whether or not it’s a good idea to use Git with Dropbox, as well as plenty of links to tutorials and other resources, including actual code for making it work:
- How to use Dropbox as a git repository
- Simple Deployment using Git (or Mercurial) and DropBox
- On Version Control
- Github is for “social coding”, meaning it gives you public repositories for free (for private space, you need to buy a service), and it got some shout-outs.
- Alternative repository hosting at RepositoryHosting.com; $6/month for 2Gb of storage, flat rate with extra storage available at $1/mo/Gb.
- Or, said one comment on Reddit: use use git as a dropbox repository. The link is to an as-yet not functional tool to do just that, more or less.
- Also noted was Prgmr.com, which offers VPS services. That is, virtual servers, since the discussion is about using a file server service (Dropbox).