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28.1.1.1 Understanding the problems it addresses ¶

Version control systems provide you with three important capabilities:

• Reversibility: the ability to back up to a previous state if you discover that some modification you did was a mistake or a bad idea.
• Concurrency: the ability to have many people modifying the same collection of files knowing that conflicting modifications can be detected and resolved.
• History: the ability to attach historical data to your data, such as explanatory comments about the intention behind each change to it. Even for a programmer working solo, change histories are an important aid to memory; for a multi-person project, they are a vitally important form of communication among developers.