I’m thinking of trying a VCS such as subversion, to manage my next project, but I’m not sure if will offer any real benefits for me as a web developer. As I understand it, one of the major benefits of a VCS is that a group of people can work on a project at once.
Reading material on the subject seems pretty one sided:
“Using a version control system is an
absolute must for a developer of a
project above a few hundred lines of
code”
…and I’ve got a feeling it could become a chore, with not many benefits.
I work on development server on the local network, so any amount of people can work on the files already. If anyone needs to get in remotely, they use FTP. What would a modern version control system give me on top of this?
In your situation it can give you at least four additional benefits:
1) It will serve as additional backup storage.
2) If you accidentally add bugs you can easily return to the previous stable version.
3) If you accidentally add a bug or break something – you can see differences between your current source code and last commited source code – the VCS will show you the differences in a very suitable and demonstrative way – and you will easily find the change that caused the bug or the problem. This one is very useful.
4) You can easily review your modifications before committing. Believe me, you can be surprised 🙂 Sometimes you just do something automatically, not thinking very much, or you can be tired. In this case, if you review your modifications later – you can find mistakes or bad code.
Good luck!