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I find myself editing R code files on Windows using RStudio. But often I want to keep previous versions in case I make a mistake and want to roll back to a previous version etc.

Right now RStudio offers no native way to do this. I end up doing this manually saving files like "foo.R" "foo_bkup_jan17_6pm.R" etc.

Is there a program that will let me do this without cluttering up my directories like this? When I used to work on a linux machine I had bazaar do this pretty well for me.

Any thoughts about a good application / workflow to do this?

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There are a lot of different tools available for this. What you're looking for is a version control system.

Examples would include SVN and (more popular these days) GIT which probably would work.

Personally I'd use GIT. There are quite a few GUIs available for it. The current Visual Studio has integration and Atlassian SourceTree provides an easy to use interface. This solution would add a hidden .git directory to your project directory and you would have to manually check it in.

An alternative approach would be to use the Windows Previous Version feature. This would enable you restore items in a Windows native way. The versioning wouldn't be as explicit and you wouldn't be able to store a useful comment with it.

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  • The TortoiseSVN client can create a local "file://” repository which can be committed to in the same way as a normal repository without the need for a remote server.
    – Mokubai
    Jan 19, 2017 at 7:24
  • Thanks for pointing it out. it's been ages since I used SVN. I removed the false statement.
    – Seth
    Jan 19, 2017 at 7:35

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