What is the difference between all the different types of version control?

Question

After being told by at least 10 people on SO that version control was a good thing even if it\'s just me I now have a followup question.

What is the difference betwe

Answer 1

The simple answer is, do you like Undo buttons? The answer is of course yes, because we as human being make mistakes all the time.

As programmers, its often the case though that it can take several hours of testing, code changes, overwrites, deletions, file moves and renames before we work out the method we are trying to use to fix a problem is entirely the wrong one and the code is more broken than when we started.

As such, Source Control is a massive Undo button to revert the code to an earlier time when the grass was green and the food plentiful. And not only that, because of how source control works, you can still keep a copy of your broken code, in case a few weeks down the line you want to refer to it again and cherry pick any good ideas that did come out of it.

I personally (though it could be called overkill) use a free Single user license version of Source Gear Fortress (which is their Vault source control product with bug tracking features). I find the UI really simple to use, it supports both the checkout > edit > checkin model and the edit > merge > commit model. It can be a little tricky to set up though, requiring you to run a local copy of ISS and SQL server. You might want to try a smaller program, like those recommended by other answers here. See what you like and what you can afford.