Personal Source Control via SubVersion -- stop me before I go too far!

"Joey Hess, a developer on the Debian project, has written a long, instructive article about using subversion for personal use: Subverting your homedir, or keeping your life in svn. I think you'll find some good ideas in there.

If you read carefully at the top and bottom of that article, you'll see that he first implemented this idea in CVS and now keeps most of his home directory in git"

"While subversion is for source control, I (ab)use it for backup. There are a number of interesting limitations I've run into:

using http transport, I have sometimes run into 2GB transfer limits on checkouts and commits, but not always
the .svn subdirectory has a second copy of every file, so you immediately double your space needs
large numbers of files in a directory get very slow
the subversion repository never shrinks; it will only grow in size, even when you ""delete"" a file because it keeps the history of that file having been there in the past

However, even with these limitations I find it works very well for me. One interesting thing you can do on the server is use the post-commit hook to push a copy of each commit to an offsite location automatically (using the svnadmin tool to do an incremental dump of that revision)."

"Rock on!
I've been doing this for a couple of years, and its really great! It does take a little care though, but now whenever I get a new machine I do svn co, and run a script in there and I get firefox and everything like I like it."