I agree with pboin. Using any kind of version control is better than no version control.

Even manually archiving your files is better than nothing. I used this option when contracting for an organization who would not install any version control software and would not let us install any software on our dev machines. So I wrote a script that compressed all the projet files. I ran it at least once per day.

I have also used Visual Source Safe, and this too is better than nothing. I would say however that it's support for branching and merging is very limited. It also suffers from frequent database corruption and things get worse when your repository reaches 2gb in size.

I recently converted my shop to SVN. My reasons for picking SVN are as follows:

• It is free.
• It runs on Windows.
• There is a large community of users from which you can get support.
• There are many client tools, however for Windows TortoiseSvn is probably the best.

The same can be said about CVS but SVN sports many enhancements over CVS such as:

• Atomic commits.
• Cheap copying (which includes cheap branching and tagging since they are copy operations)
• All files committed in one operation are given the same revision number. (some don't like this, but I do)
• Versioning of file properties.
• Versioning of directories.
• Built in move and rename operations. (rename is actually the same as move)
• Apache modules for remote HTTP access.
• Apache modules for directory security.

The install and configuration of SVN and Apache on a WinXP box was straight forward. I purchased the book "Pragmatic Version Control: Using Subversion" and it details step by step what you need to do in Appendix A. This information is also available in the free online book: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/index.html

So in short, define your needs and choose a system that meets your needs. If you have a hard time making a decision after that, then I would choose SVN. Unless your needs are greater than SVN can support (which is unlikely unless you are a huge shop), I don't think you can go wrong with that choice.

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