What is Git (version control system) and why you need to use it for your projects (any project with files and content, not just code)

How to track changes to one or several files and do not go crazy in the process.

When you work on something for more than a couple of hours and across several days or months, you are bound to try new things, ways of writing, code, images and so on. And while doing so, you will probably start creating many files with different names for the same content so that you can have versions, such as Text-1.txt, texts-1-1.txt, project-a-final.docx, project-a-final-2.docx, and so on. If you have a more structured mindset you may even use a time stamp on your file names in the form of project-a-2022-11-12-1211.docx or similar. After a couple of tries, you have tens or even hundreds of files and you won’t even know which one was the correct one. This gets even more complicated if you also want to collaborate with others (and not depend on Google Docs (or similar) or if your project cannot be done in such tools).

Here comes a version control system (aka as VCS) to help. Instead of manually creating files and giving them a name, saving them somewhere and tying to find out which one you really wanted to use, or which parts of which files, you my as well use a vcs, in this case git, to manage the whole thing. If you use it the right way, you will even have a nice history of your changes.