Distributed Version Control Systems?

These systems do not necessarily rely on a central server to store all the versions of a project file.

In Distributed VCS, every contributor has a local copy or “clone” of the main repository i.e. everyone maintains a local repository of their own which contains all the files and metadata present in the main repository.

You will understand it better by referring to the diagram below:

As you can see in the above diagram, every programmer maintains a local repository on its own, which is actually the copy or clone of the central repository on their hard drive. They can commit and update their local repository without any interference.

They can update their local repositories with new data from the central server by an operation called “pull” and affect changes to the main repository by an operation called “push” from their local repository.

The act of cloning an entire repository into your workstation to get a local repository gives you the following advantages:

All operations (except push & pull) are very fast because the tool only needs to access the hard drive, not a remote server. Hence, you do not always need an internet connection.

Committing new change-sets can be done locally without manipulating the data on the main repository. Once you have a group of change-sets ready, you can push them all at once.

Since every contributor has a full copy of the project repository, they can share changes with one another if they want to get some feedback before affecting changes in the main repository.

If the central server gets crashed at any point of time, the lost data can be easily recovered from any one of the contributor’s local repositories.