Over at Fosslife, V.M. Brasseur considers the question of why you should use Git, or some other version control system, for your solo projects. Brasseur was shocked when one of her coworkers expressed surprise that she used Git even for personal, one-developer projects. I do the same thing. I check virtually all my work into Git and have for many years.
But why would you do that? Brasseur gives seven reasons to use Git on solo projects. The TL;DR of her reasons are:
- Syncing between computers so you can work on the project from any of your computers.
- Backup (especially with an offsite repository).
- Being able to backtrack to previous versions for debugging.
- Organizing your data by putting it in known places.
- Code reuse.
- Issue tracking.
- No project is really solo. Future-you will appreciate the project history.
Those are all good reasons but the real question is: why wouldn’t you version control your work? It doesn’t really cost anything other than a little extra, increasingly cheap disk space, and can really save the day when you need to dig into the project’s history.