File Versioning

File versioning is something I have been interested in since I started out doing programming for my simulations back in university. Later, I was lucky enough to be able to use (La)TeX to type my PhD thesis, which enabled me to use CVS to track changes to my text.

Years later, I'm less lucky in that I do not use LaTeX anymore (neither do I program in C ;-), but I do still want my documents and scripts to be versioned, especially when actively working on them. I used to create copies for major versions of Word or PowerPoint documents. At the end, I deleted most of the intermediate copies because they were no longer relevant.

But now, everything has changed dramatically... due to FileHamster. FileHamster is a versioning tool, that automatically tracks changes to files and directories and allows you to keep those changes, revert to earlier versions, backup and by means of some handy plugins add notes and remarks to versions. And ... it is free !



Behind the scenes, the tool creates a copy of every version you save, so you do use a lot of space for big files, but you cannot blame a tool for the fact that most of the files we work with nowadays are composed of binary data!