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I'm an ex-software developer who still likes to code as a hobby from time to time. I'd like to have some sort of source control at home which enables me to save/tag versions, lets me do comparisons between file versions, and is easy to setup, use, maintain and backup.

Back in the day we used Visual SourceSafe at work which, far from the best tool for the job, but it did what it had to do for us: allow us to view version history and differences, and check-in/check-out for a single developer (something which was very important for us at the time). For my own situation I obviously don't care about checkin/checkout, as there is no need for it.

Now before everyone starts recommending Git, I've used Git at work but as a hobby developer, I absolutely hate it, so please skip Git as a recommendation.

Other tools I've tried are Subversion (with and without Tortoise), Mercurial, and SourceJammer (a Java SourceSafe alternative which no longer exists). SourceJammer comes closest to what I'm looking for, but it's useless by now.

As for maintenance, I'm mainly looking at ease of backup - a single folder which can be zipped daily and copied to a NAS or something along those lines.

Does anybody have any suggestions for a simple tool?

Thanks!

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Fossil SCM may be good choice for your needs

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  • Thanks, I like the suggestion, even though it's command line based like Git. I found Fuel (a fossil GUI client) but it doesn't seem to be under development anymore... It looks like a good replacement for Visual SourceSafe, but I cannot seem to find an easy way to return to a previous version of a file. It's possible to revert the changes, but unlike SourceSafe, I cannot find an easy option to go back to say, version 5 out of 7. Also, Fossil seems to build a repository within the code directory, as opposed to a centralized repository like SourceSafe. Still, thanks for the suggestion!
    – Marlon
    Sep 8, 2021 at 20:24
  • @Marlon: 1) Yes, Fuel SCM is now the single GUI option, but you can at least try built-in webui 2) While Fossil (as all current VCSes) work with changesets, not single files (in most operations), you can update any single file (of fileset/s/) to any historical version, read about fossil update in doc, pay attention to "FILES" optional parameter: "If one or more FILES are listed after the VERSION then only the named files are candidates to be updated..." Sep 19, 2021 at 19:20

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