How Do You Control Your Source Code?

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
I've never used source code version control of any kind, and I hear so much about its importance that I'm thinking I'm missing out on something (like what a big difference having a debugger is). I've heard much of CVS and SVN, and now I see git is considered a big deal, etc etc.

What I've had happen is I make some change, get a week down the road and then go "oh, I wish I hadn't deleted that piece of code..." or something gets terribly screwed up and I need to go back to a functional version and start anew.

The way I handle this now is I zip up my CI application and gmail it to myself every day or few days or so.

Old fashioned, huh? Thing is, I don't like messing around with stuff that doesn't make a Big Difference. If it's not really vastly superior to my existing 'system', or it is only important in a large team environment, or if its needed for 'builds' (which I don't see the need for in my projects, there is just the live commercial version and the development version).

I program on Windows and deploy onto Linux, so anything I choose will need to fit this. Ideally I could install it onto my linux server and then use a client on windows, but even better I'd like to be able to have a server on windows itself to learn it better - because I don't really like installing anything on my server, as its locked-down tight and PCI compliant and it's a pain in the ass to manage as I'm the admin too

So, I'm I missing out on something that would be worthwhile, or have I just not used it because I really don't need any fancy or automated source control tools?

I only relatively recently started using an IDE (PHPed), ORM (DataMapper), and of course the CodeIgniter framework after many years of using pure PHP and Editplus - because they worked just fine for what I wanted to do and I didn't have to spend time learning tools when I could have been programming. So that's pretty much my philosophy on dev tools - I don't like getting programs or tools 'just because', or that take more time than they are really worth in the short-term.

Thanks for everyone's experiences, opinions, and suggestions!