Version Control
When I was writting my first journal article, as many of others, I used file names to indicate its version. I had a manuscrip.docx as the beginning draft, sent to other coauthors to review, included the comments and ended up as manuscript_v2.docx. Typically, this will end up as manuscript_final.docx, which you wish to be the last version.
A typical roadmap for saving your files is shown below.
In reality, this list goes on.
This is a live form of version control, despite being in a very inefficient way.
If you only have two or three versions it's probably fine. However, the drawbacks are quite obvious:
You have multiple copies of the same document in the same folder.
Only you remember (hopefully) what has been done. It's hard to include others to collaborate.
It's hard to know easily which one contains what changes.
It lacks clarity on why you've made certain changes.
There's no rules to protect the history, e.g. you could save a change in a previous version by accident.
In addition, this will quickly become unmanagable when there are associated files (like experiment data) for each version.
There's a much better way.
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