HelpSpa.com

In Part I of this article we discussed the importance of version control for web developers/designers, and I reviewed the structure of the system I created for my own use. Here in Part II, we’re going to review how to keep track of the contents of these versions.

When we left off at the end of Part I, we had a website and the following directories:

/website
/website_v1.0-backup
/website_v1.1-backup
/website_v2.0-backup
/website_v2.1-backup

The way I track the changes and the differences among each version is with an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has the following columns:Version, Date, Change.

So very simply, each time I create a new version folder, record it in the excel spreadsheet. Here’s an example for the updates we simulated in Part I:

You can be as detailed or as brief as you like — it’s your preference. But now take a look at the value of what you have! If three months later you go in and make more adjustments to the contact form and wind up with errors, you clearly know that version 2.1 had the last working contact form, and you can copy the files back from that directory to the working (/website) directory.

Another Way to Restore A Backup to Dreamweaver - The Whole Site — Not Just Files
Now that we’ve completed our discussion of the version control system, I wanted to review another way to restore your site. I mentioned in the past that if you made a mistake with “stylesheet.css” in the current (/website) directory, you could always find the same file in the appropriate version backup folder But what if you changed a few files and can’t find the error?

Here’s what you do. First, make sure you have working backups. Then, delete everything from the /website directory, but not the directory itself. So now you have an empty /website directory. Head to the version you wish to restore back to (e.g. /website_v2.1-backup), and copy the contents of this folder to the /website folder. That’s it. Remember that the current version of the site, the /website directory, will always have the same content as the most recent backup version.

I hope this all makes sense. Please let me know if you have any questions, or if you have a system to share, too!