How Do You Control Your Source Code?

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
[quote author="K-Fella" date="1274731260"]
I realise this thread is getting old, but I was wondering if i could get some advice.
[/quote]

Correct - it will pull in a bunch of people who don't loiter around the forums much anymore - best to start a new thread than revive one that's more than a month or two old generally.

I'm basically in the same situation as Brian. I'm a freelancer (work alone) and have been working on a large CI powered site for a client the last few months. Everyday (when I've had enough coding for one day) I RAR the local folder into my Dropbox folder and it gets uploaded as my backup.

git will help. Actually, any VCS will help, but git will likely be easier for you.

Daily archives means that the average impact of a disaster is 4-5 hours of code lost - worst case is a day's worth. This seems an excessive risk.

Then I have to FTP into the site and upload the changes (on a live site too!).

{blink} Well .. while you're in the market for modern technology, check out scp/sftp too.

I've known about version control for a while but never really understood how it's used.

Be more specific - what, that this thread didn't cover, are you having troubles with?

Does it make updating a live site easier?

I think so, yes. It makes it more manageable, certainly. Updating a site should be fairly painless even if you're just FTP'ing up a tarball and doing a roll-in/roll-out process.

In order to use version control with your host do they need to support the type you choose?

(mostly) Yes. You should find most places will support git these days. I suspect you could even install it manually if they didn't have it bundled already. OTOH if you currently use FTP, they might not be particularly modern.

Are there vc tools for Windows that work just as well as for other OS's? I've search for articles on how to use Git/etc for web development and other related topics, but never really grasped the concept.

I don't use Microsoft Windows, so can't comment from direct experience, but I gather that the state of play of git on that platform these days is pretty good.

Install git, and run through some of the easy stuff at:
[url="http://spheredev.org/wiki/Git_for_the_lazy"]http://spheredev.org/wiki/Git_for_the_lazy[/url] and
[url="http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/everyday.html"]http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/everyday.html[/url]

Do some examples, use gitk to get a graphical look at the results, look at the Network stuff on github, etc.

Then read through the pro git book at : [url="http://progit.org/book"]http://progit.org/book[/url]