Version Control

If you have more than a moderate sized project or more than one of you working on the same project then this is worth a look. It allows anyone working on the project to access all previous versions of all files, highlight the differences and identify exactly who changed them and when - all in a reasonably straight forward way. Multiple versions of the dataset can be maintained in parallel and they can be merged at some future time if required.

A survey of the therion list subscribers a while back brought up;

If you think you might have to take your project to a 'desert cave island' or up a mountain away from internet access, and you want to use two or more laptops to double the drawing rate and act as mutual backups, then you need software that supports a distributed model.

bazaar

Assuming you figure out how to use bazaar then one of the first things you'll need is a .ignore file to prevent insignificant files from being versioned. Here is my one tailored to my usage of therion bzrignoretherion.zip, annotated below as follows. I have not annotated the attached file, as any trailing or leading characters on lines will render the .ignore file ineffective.

.*.dat	#filters out all files that start with '.' and end with '.dat' at all directory
 levels.  This prevents the .xtherion.dat files that are created each runtime from being
 versioned.
*.esri  #these next several lines prevent common therion output files from being versioned.
*.db
*.html
*.k??	#filters out kml and kmz files etc
*.log
*.lox
*.pdf
*.sql
/**/thTMPDIR/**/ #filters out all temporary directories sometimes created by Therion
 (in debug mode).
/**/Output*/**/	#filters out all files and directories below the 'Output' or 'Outputs'
 folder but not the Output directory itself.  ie The Output folder WILL be versioned,
 but not it's contents.  This ensures that Therion will run smoothly if an 'export' of
 the cave dataset is made.

Bazaar is the one I've chosen to play with, so someone else will have to write about the other applications…

Git

Mercurial

Subversion