[derekp7]

Version control is one of those areas that is very difficult for a lone programmer to understand the need for (I was one). After all, I have backups, right? So why would I need it? Then I hit a snag, where something that worked before somehow didn't work now. And it was a lot harder tracking that down by going through backups, vs doing a git bisect and git revert. Eventually I ended up restoring every backup, and checking them into git.

[saganus]

Same here regarding version control.. until one day I after graduating from college I nostalgically searched for my old college files... and... oh the horror... my files where somewhere between "project1.final_backup_almost_final.java" and "project15.final_not_working.java.backup3" going through more strange things which I can't even think of why I named files like that, along the lines of "epsiloneridani43.final_working_working.tosubmit.java" and of course the project file I ended up sending to the teacher was something like "project16.working_again3.java" ...sigh

[grey-area]

You see a huge amount of this sort of poor-man's version control in other industries - everyone I have worked with in other industries has worked out some personal scheme of versioning using initials, dates, numbering in order to sequence the various states of their work as it passes through multiple people and multiple versions.

A lot of room for disruption there I think if someone works out how to make version control fit better with ordinary people's view of the world (i.e. not git, svn etc). Versions in word are the closest I've seen to it but it really shouldn't be in one specific program but in the OS or a helper program.

[ygra]

File History in Windows 8 is nice, sort of. It takes snapshots of changed files every hour. Sadly you have to enable it first and it's sort-of treated as a backup (so you have to store the copies on a different volume, etc.). So, not exactly what people have in their home unless they know about such things.

[grey-area]

I think the missing solution here though is collaboration and versioning between people, rather than individual backups.

Things like File History and Time Machine are nice, but don't really address this need.

[runiq]

To be fair, though, once you get the hang of it, you have to take care not to apply it to everything. Back when I grokked Mercurial (first VCS for me), I used it for packaging scripts, dotfiles, /etc files, todo lists, shopping lists for the grocery store, financial accounting, and my own poor man's dropbox clone (please don't ask).

"When you have a ham^H^H^HVCS, everything looks like a programming project".

[stephencanon]

O to be young and innocent of version control.