dk101.net Nominated for best adaptation of a boring life

In the past couple of weeks I've been having a lot of problems keeping all my websites up to date without a lot of messing around. This is mainly due to the amount of different machines I now code on. I've been editing websites directly online for a long time now, and although I personally knew the possible downfalls nothing had ever happened to make me legitimatly stop doing it. A few weeks ago I managed to loose around 3 weeks of work that was not backed up due to a web server error. Again, this was a mistake on my part, but it finally hit home how important it was to stop editing my files online and at least work from a local copy.

I tried directly downloading files I needed to edit, changing them and then uploading them again. This was slow, especially if I was editing multiple files within a very complex directory structure. So I downloaded a few pieces of software that 'syncs' your website to a local copy. This worked reasonably well until I started adding multiple computers into the picture as the first 'sync' downloaded all files and gave them a new timestamp thus next 'sync' they uploaded all the downloaded files. This was tiresome and I eventually remembered something that Del had told me about months before.

This was SVN, it is a revision management system. It does everything I need it to. Syncs a local copy to the current one in the repository. Syncs my website to the current one in the repository. Only updates files that have changed. Lets me set specific revisions with comments so I know why I changed various versions. Best of all, all revisions are stored for later retrival, if I find I have messed up a file I can simply restore from a previous version. I've only been using it for 24 hours but it has made my life so lovely already hopefully there are even more fun features I have yet to discover!