I have two hobbies: writing and programming. In both of these it’s very important to be able to track your revisions and recover previous versions. For the past year or so I have used the TortoiseSVN client for source control, but I didn’t really understand what I was doing.
Until the other day, when I read Eric Sink’s excellent source control HOWTO. This covers pretty much everything you would need to know about editing documents and saving your changes.
Better still, not only does it apply to computer code, it applies to stories equally well. Finish a draft? Save it with a tag. An editor asks for revisions? Create a branch that may be later merged into the main trunk. Decide you liked that scene you deleted 2 months ago? It’s still there.
Plus it’s handy for procrastination. Think of all the time you could waste getting this set up right when you should be writing prose/code!