Here is a great article on the benefits of Subversion (SVN) from Red Hat Magazine. If you are a not familiar with it perhaps you’re familiar with its cousin CVS. Both of which are version control systems (essentially a giant undo/redo database for all your code and files). Perhaps that definition is the most simplistic… but you get the idea. Well Subversion ups the ante on CVS with an all new well-designed codebase that will let it grow in amazing new directions that old CVS can’t. Did I mention it is open source?

As a designer/programmer here at Brainfood I use Tortoise SVN on a Windows machine. Though I was initially hesitant at first… (Hey! manually backing up my work was working for me…) I have found SVN and before that CVS to be beneficial when working with asci formatted documents such as xhtml, framemaker templates, javascript as well as exported images and assets such as gifs, jpgs, swfs, etc… Larger binaries such as Photoshop, Flash, and source video, we still maintain manually.

For more information on Subversion check out the free online book Version Control with Subversion