Joey Hess, a famous Debian hacker, wrote long ago an article about how he was keeping his entire home directory under version control, using CVS. Now, as CVS gets replaced by Subversion, he switched to it, and new article was released.
He gives advice on how to split private and public projects, how to keep configuration files under version control, how to use the same home directory on multiple machines. Of course, main advantages of described approach are distributed backups (including inherent mini-backups in form of file copies in the .svn directory); history of your work and configuration changes, including rollback and comparisons; and single synchronized workspace across every machine you’re using.
Read more at OnLamp: Joey Hess “Keeping Your Life in Subversion” or at his blog: joey: “Subverting your homedir, or keeping your life in svn” (contains extra links and updates).
Recent posts on similar topics
- RFC: let's make textual conflicts more personal - December 17th, 2008
- Karl Fogel: "Subversion’s Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology" - October 27th, 2007
- Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick: "Subversion Worst Practices" - October 12th, 2007
- Karl Fogel, Ben Collins-Sussman, on distributed version control - October 11th, 2007
- Tim O'Reilly: Why Congress Needs a Version Control System - October 7th, 2007