About Git for non-users
It may not be immediately obvious that Git isn’t just a tool for developers to manage and share code. On this page, we hope to describe the usefulness of Git to someone who has never used it.
“Save early, save often” with time travel
We all learned at some point to “save early, save often”. Maybe we learned the hard way by starting with a very naive approach to writing a document:
Saving when you’re done editing a file
If your computer crashes before you’re done, you could lose all your work!
Saving frequently
If your computer crashes, you’ll be able to recover where you last saved. But what if you save and then later realize that part of your document had been deleted before saving?
Saving copies frequently
This enables you to view old versions of your document, as long as you manually
saved a copy with a unique name. But what if you start having trouble figuring
out whether the version you want is document_new_final_really_final.csv
or
document_final_v2_latest.csv
?
Saving copies with a naming convention
This enables you to find the right version at a glance. Maybe you use dates or a version number that always goes up. This requires you to put in a nontrivial amount of effort managing your versions.
Using a version management program
Instead of manually naming your files, a program could do it for you. You don’t
even need to look at all those copies because that program could store them
somewhere out of sight, and put only the version you want in document.csv
.
This program could also talk to other version management programs to share all
the different versions with someone else, and also get their versions and help
merge your work with theirs. This is what Git does.