Summary: Simply put it is a system for professionals like programers (with large programs), web content manager, etc. Once you understand the concept, it is very practical and work-load will significantly lowered. It takes some time to get the idea, though.

It is not an easy out-of-box tool. There is a concept and without understanding it, it does not work, even you can not use it; you will get full of errors, which you can not understand if you understand the concept.

Structure:

• Repository: on Physical Server.
• Work copy1: Test environment. on virtual machine on Client Machine(Let's note)
• Work copy2: open to the Internet. on Physical Server.

It is a network system over the internet. Thus Security is also an issue. I set up on SVN over ssh with public key authentication.

SubVersion is amazing. I have heard a rumor of such system for a long time. but finally I started to use it. This is useful for web system management too and this is my main use. My site contains already 8766 files... it has been increasing a bit by a bit. It is hard to follow which file I modified and which I did not. This version management system automatically check the whole files and directories and it uploads only updated/modified files of 8766 files! in matter of a few seconds!! Obviously this is not a human being's job but computer's.

Also the number of binary files have been increased and these files are usually big (eg. photo, audio). I have my own small program to archive all the necessary files which are open to the public and upload the server to the server. It has been working fine, but the archive size is getting bigger and bigger due to increase of bigger files even if I have been carefully added the least number of such big files in the public system. but now it is getting close to 50MB. Uploading even 30MB everytime is taking time. So I have been feeling that I needed to start using it.