Why should you use SubVersion?

I believe that SVN (or for that matter any version control application) can be a useful tool not just for the developer community but for anyone who wants to have proper versioning and organization of their data. Whether it is music, photos, documents, presentations or anything else. I have been using SVN at home and office since quite some time now and I am able to conclude that it really helps me and my colleagues at office, organize and store their data in an efficient manner. I would list here some of the top benefits of using SVN for every computer user, whether it’s at office or at home.

1. Quick Versioning – Say for example you have been working on a proposal for a client and have made quite many changes to the document and each time, you have done a “Save As” of your document and appended a silly number to it for your understanding. I know it can get tedious after sometime, since even I have been through all this many times and in the end, you might just get confused with what’s there in what.
Well, this problem can be neatly solved if you are using an SVN system. The system is intelligent enough to track your changes and each change is assigned a revision number with a date and time stamp, so you end up having only one working copy at all times, but you can always switch to an older version of the same document if you choose to and again come back to the latest version without even doing any kind of “Save As” and getting into the messy game of giving your custom version numbers.

2. Easy Backup & Restore – I would always recommend you to have a separate system to host your SVN Server. So the problem of Single point of failure can be easily dealt with. Ideally you should have a separate system for you to use for your normal work and a separate system to host your SVN Server. Don’t think that you would need an expensive server grade system for this. Even your old laptop or desktop would just suffice. So in case your working system goes for a toss for any reason, and you have sync’d your data with the SVN Server, then it’s extremely simple to get your data back. All you have to do is restore your operating system, install the SVN client (I am using Tortoise SVN) and just perform a checkout. It’s that simple and all of your data will come back and sit on your system as if nothing had gone wrong. And yes, you will still have access to all the history that your data has gone through. Ain’t that amazing!

3. Easy for Collaboration and group Work – If you happen to work on something as a group, it’s very simple to check out what edits have been made by your team members and which one would you like to see. So referring back and forth is easy as sipping coffee. Without this, I am sure you would be exchanging emails with all the various versions of your data without knowing who has done what.

4. Handy tool for telecommuters – You either work from home or are constantly on the move. You can still always get the latest version of all your documents and works. At the same time, you can have a secure copy of all your data in case something goes wrong with your computer. SVN can be implemented typically on a web server with SSL encryption. So your data is transmitted over a secure connection. (Same kind of encryption that most banks use.) In some cases, you can even access all your data using just your web browser.

5. Quick reference to Historical Data, anywhere on any system – It pretty much works like Apple’s Time Machine. You can restore your data state dating back pretty long. And that too to any system. All you have to do is install the SVN Client and perform a checkout.

In my future articles I would be more technical, specific and HOW-TO style.