Source control for single author

[jencasty9]

Any tips and recommendations on how I should go about this?

[devans]

Do you actually need source control? I am single author too and I just keep my own backups. They haven't failed me yet!

[RamonS]

I think even for a single author source control is beneficial. It helps keeping the versions organized, allows for easily managing multiple branches, and theoretically also with merging changes into multiple branches. With units of work being submitted you can easily roll those back if needed. Depending on where source control lives and how it is accessed you can also use it from multiple locations (home/office/while away) and with sources in source control the build server of the application can pull the latest version labeled as ready for deployment, compile it, and stuff it into the deployment package.
You can do the same with plain ol'd backups to some extent, but you will need to stick meticulously to backup and naming conventions using folders and organizational schemes. For a build server it is also easier to get sources only from one place.
I suggest doing both, use source control and grab plain file backups of the projects and keep backups of the source control repository. Might sound a bit paranoid, but after experiencing major hardware failure once you will be very happy that you kept enough copies to get back to work within a matter of hours.

[BrianBAtCeres]

I suggest doing both, use source control and grab plain file backups of the projects and keep backups of the source control repository. Might sound a bit paranoid, but after experiencing major hardware failure once you will be very happy that you kept enough copies to get back to work within a matter of hours.

I second this excellent advice. I produce HTML5 and CHM outputs and it makes it very easy for the developers to get my latest CHM file. Also, the developers switched repositories a few months and I lost some work in the new repository but it I was able to recover everything I lost from personal backups.

Brian