I regularly make backups of all my data, it’s also synchronized on several computers and hard disks. But since I backup only once a week, I don’t really have several revisions from files available between the backups. This is espacially necessary if you work on some code of a small project, which is not revisioned via svn or cvs – and you don’t want to or have no access to svn. Also you don’t want to set up a local svn or cvs repository. You could use Time Machine on Mac OS X and there are some other tools available on Windows, like FileHamster. But FileHamster wasn’t always trouble free and by coincidence I found another solution which is rather appealing: Mercurial.

The nice thing about Mercurial is, that it is a fast, distributed, lightweight Source Control Management system – you don’t need a server for it. The revisions are save to the local .hg folder. In this post I just explain some basics to get started (on Windows – but apart from the installation process, it’s the same for Mac OS X and Linux).

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