It's smart to have backups of important information. The best way to have backups for programming projects is source control.

I've used source control (git, specifically) for personal programming projects, professional software development, journals, and websites. It works well for anything text-based.

Source control is super useful because it tracks incremental history of changes. That makes it easy to hone in on when a change (good or bad) was made with some context of why. That's useful when tracking down a nasty bug! It's also useful when researching why specific design decisions were made.


Some helpful options to get started with source control:

- Use https://github.com to create and host repositories for free

- Another free option is Bitbucket

- Create your own local git repository that lives directly on your computer. Learn more here.


Because code can often be reused, I recommend using git for nearly all the code you ever write. It's even useful to have a git repository that's just for small utilities or toying around. Use a local git repository if you want to keep it private.

You can find my own public GitHub repositories here.