Before you start your software project, what's the first thing you do?

Before you start your software project, what's the first thing you do? For me i will backup my project first before continuing. Why, simply because i could undo it if something goes wrong, at least i could save my preciuos time. Let say, you are hadling a project A and you have spend the first 2 hours doing something wonderful, later on you did something funny and your whole project corrupted. fortunetly after spending 20minutes to find the the cause of the problems, you got the solution and then you spend another 30minutes to fix it, complile it and test it. You almost got there just a few step to fully recover it and it takes another 30 minutes for through testing. Finally you just got to recover the whole thing. In this senario how much time you have spend to recover it? it is almost 1 and a half hour doing something which is not productive. imagine that if you had "rar" (backup) the project at the first place and later you recover it via unrar it. how long does "unrar" takes? 2minutes vs 90minutes. Got it?

Let me show you the simple and yet effective way of backup your software project.

Let say your project is save under ProjectA, now you pretty sure that ProjectA iteration task is completed and you wish to backup it. So just rar it to ProjectA_V1.rar, well this is your first version of backup. You continue again your development iteration, after each successful task is done you rar it again, and now you rar it as ProjectA_V2 and so on and so forth.

When you encountered a corruption on your project and now you wish to recover it, therefore you look for the lastest .rar that you have backup.

One interesting question, why rar it? rar it could save your disk space but this is not the main reason. The only reason is because you pretty sure that you do not accidently modify the file inside the folder in case you did not rar it.