The version control mess I got myself into.

I didn't know what did I start when I took Getting Things Done off my shelf once again... I read about 1/3 of it a few years ago and now starting from the beginning again, maybe because seeing the success other people are having with it...

What is the problem? Well, every day I spend about 6-8 hours (at least!) with computers, so the organization has to include all my "digital pockets". Yeah, right... I have two laptops, one desktop that I use occasionally, one computer at work, an Openmoko (which is also almost like a computer, sweet Linux power), 3-4 usb pens, 2 external hard drives... That's a lot of stuff to keep synchronized and organized...

And it didn't help the cause that I might have jumped into the things pretty deep right away. So, for example, the geeks we are, let's use a version control system (VCS) for our data! Okay, which one? Of the main ones, SVN, CVS are old (to me) so nope, and what's left is Git, Bazaar and Mercurial. The first is very popular, the second is getting popular, and don't know much about the third one (or any other). But if I manage my backup with version control, what about my occasional programming projects? Should it be the same/different version control? Ideally it should be the same, because it will give me less headaches, incomatibilities, less new things to learn.... But then maybe I will want to share my programming with the world, so let's check out the source code hosting sites!
Well, the two biggest ones seem to be Repo.or.cz, GitHub and Launchpad. And of course they use different VCS, Git by the first two, Bazaar by the last one... Okay, let's look at the features. GitHub is social and it has stats, and shiny but only 100MB hosting. Repo.or.cz is very-very simple and unlimited. Launchpad is unlimited, has bug-tracker, forums, feature planning, software translation.... Okay, let's see then what projects that I know uses what: Git by the Linux Kernel (of course, Linus wrote Git exactly for this purpose), Android, Cairo, HAL, D-Bus, Perl5, Samba,VLC, Fedora.... Bazaar by Exaile, MySQL, Ubuntu..... So there are more interesting things on Git (for me at least).... But, but, but....

Ah.... This start to feel like a question like whether we should go to have Japanese or Indian for dinner. Both are great, similar but not compatible, I have fav dishes in both, and they both have major fanbase who will tell you how much better one is then the other. And both of them can stain your shirt if you are careless (I have amazing ability to bork computer things)... ;)

Sooooooooooooo..... From getting organized I ended up being in a philosphical spiral without the possibility of a simple "This/That" answer in the end.... Great. Let's just choose one cuisine and have dinner already.

I started with Git, then because for a bit it looked easy (or easier). Well, very quickly it got confusing. When I modify things on two computers and try to reconcile the data, mor often then not I run into "X would be overwritten by update, cannot merge", and "Y is not uptodate (sic), cannot pull changes" and so on... Damn, I already spent a week reading documentations, and I was writing my own little notes, and still it ends up being a mess and I have to spend time to manually do things. So more learning ahead, with the danger that the more I have to learn now, the more I can potentially forget and bork later...
Also, I don't want to have a single big repository, but thematically shorted smaller ones. To sync them all manually is pretty tedious. Fortunately Google found that as well when making Android (which literally has tens of Git repos) and wrote a new program for it, called Repo. Though I think it relies on an older version of Python, and my Arch Linux is not known to be nice to keep an version but the bleeding edge (sometimes even loosing a lot of blood before getting patched - {bad} pun intended). Thus this requires a little bit more effort in setting up.

This makes Git (and as much as I checked, all current VCS) pretty much unsuitable for the laymen. For example I'd love get my girlfriend to put her SAS programming into version controlling, so she won't lose her data in the way she did a few times. Yeah, show her the Windows Git interface (she's on XP & Vista) and all she's gonna say: "Oh, kill me now..." Too bad.

So now after all this ranting, the way forward is the way back. Going back to the manuals and check the situations that now I know I will encounter, and then to the drawing board again and make up a plan (David Allen would be proud). But I won't give it up, I think having any backup is better then being completely without.