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I currently use Dropbox for storing my TeX projects, but have been tempted to switch to a "real" revision control system, like Mercurial or Git, lately.

If it is worthwhile to switch, what would be some tips and pointers? My top switching question is should I use GitLab or Bitbucket to host in a private repository, or should I set up the remote repository on my server?

cjm
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    Several closely related questions has been asked already: e.g. this one and the ones it links to. On the one hand, they’ve received several answers; on the other, they’ve been generally deemed off-topic (very open-ended and subjective, and not particularly specific to TeX). If you’ve read those, and (a) you still have questions and (b) you think yours is more on-topic than they were, would you consider editing your question to clarify what you’re more specifically after? – Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine Apr 18 '16 at 21:43
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    The tl;dr though is: it depends a lot on what you’re working on with TeX — how collaboratively, how complex (e.g. maintaining journal + personal + other versions of a paper in parallel), and so on, and also how confident you are with the more technical parts of the software ecosystem (i.e. does working from the command-line intimidate you at all?). But I and most people I know who have switched to real VC feel it was completely worthwhile and we couldn’t imagine going back :-) – Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine Apr 18 '16 at 21:46
  • I mostly write by myself, sometimes with a separate editor at the end. It was using git repositories for programming that got me interested in possibly using them for my LaTeX projects. Git is what I (sort-of) know, but I'm willing to learn Hg if it's better for this kind of work. – cjm Apr 18 '16 at 22:07
  • The right answer rather depends on what you are doing with your documents. git allows easy creation of branches to try out new ideas, or alter parts of a project in parallel. You can create branches, work on them separately, then merge them together etc. Afaik you can't do this easily on Dropbox. OTOH Dropbox is much simpler - you can generally just save and forget. – Thruston Apr 18 '16 at 23:16
  • You can use Mercurial, Git etc. AND have it on Dropbox. I would heavily recommend to use a good version control system. I'm very happy with Mercurial and would recommend it if you don't need the extra features Git provides, which I think so for LaTeX documents. – Martin Scharrer Jan 17 '19 at 08:01

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