Tom Mollerus' Weblog

I'm willing to bet that like me, you've at some point in the past desperately wanted to undo a change that's happened to a web site you're working on. Perhaps you've made a text edit, saved the change, and then wanted the old version of the text back; perhaps you've uploaded your own version of a document up to the server and unknowingly overwritten changes that someone else made to the same file. We've all been there.

After having this happen to me several times, I finally woke up and smelled the coffee-- I went and set up Subversion as a version-control system for all of our web files. What a lifesaver! I will never, ever do web work without saving changes to Subversion (SVN) again.

If you've never used a version control system before, I can't encourage you enough to start. There's no longer any valid excuse not to use it:

• Using version control will be too hard to do, with checking files out, checking them in, and resolving conflicts.
  That may be what it's like to use Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe product, but SVN solves all of those problems, and makes it so easy to save changes. With SVN, you check out a copy of all of the files in the project, then edit them as you wish and save changes as you wish. There are no locks-- you can save your changes any time you like. If another developer happens to have saved changes to the same file, SVN will automatically merge the changes for you. If your changes directly conflict with those of the other developer (meaning that you've changed the same lines), SVN will let you know that you need to perform the merge yourself.
  
• I'm the only developer working with these files. Why would I need version control if I can't overwrite my own changes?
  True, you can't unknowingly overwrite your own changes. But certainly there have been and will be times that you wish you could revert to an earlier version of a page that had a better layout or lacked a certain bug. Unless you're using version control, you can't get those versions back.
  
• My web site just isn't important enough to merit version control-- it's only HTML, after all.
  When Subversion is easy to use and free, there's no good reason not to use it. And there's no site that's not going to run into the issue of needing to revert to a previous version of one page or another. Even with an HTML-only site, you may want to revert to an earlier version of your design, your CSS, your HTML, or most likely, your content.