Most organisations with a collaborative wiki have some sort of "tips and tricks" page, where users can freely add or update advice for everyone to use. It appears the CIA is no different, with the recent "Vault 7" dump from WikiLeaks revealing the US intelligence service's closely guarded collection of Git cheats. What's surprising is a few are actually useful.

Writing concise, yet descriptive commit messages for version control is a difficult art to perfect. While you're on the path of getting those notes down to their efficient best, here are a few questions to ask yourself before doing that push.

Atlassian's SourceTree is one of the nicer front-ends for version control systems Git and Mercurial. It's also free and open-source, the double-whammy of great qualities one wants in a piece of software. Unfortunately, as of version 1.6, the Windows build of the program has been crippled by an issue that causes constant freezes. The bug was reported back in August 2014, but as of late January, has yet to be fixed.

Last year we pointed you in the direction of a cheat sheet for Git, the robust, yet somewhat intimidating version control system that has many uses outside of software projects. If you're still not comfortable giving it a try, there are a number of online resources that allow you to get your hands dirty without even touching a real command line.

For the less diligent, the wisdom of making regular backups only coalesces once you lose important data in spectacular, unrecoverable fashion. There are a bunch of software options for duplicating and safe-guarding your important information, but what mechanism is best? Usually the domain of software developers, source control software, such as SVN and Git, is well-suited for regular documents and even binaries. So why aren't you using it?

When I was a lone coder, I was able to get away with using Perforce for source control, however, when I made the move to commercial games development, I had to switch to something that would support multiple users. I made the decision to use Git over SVN and while I can manage most of the time using TortoiseGit to handle commits, syncs and branches, I do have to head to the command line for the more complex operations.

When you're handling a technology meltdown (like a computer failure or a malware infection) it helps to have a running sheet of the things you're doing to remedy the crisis. Using Git can be a very effective way to do that.

Mac: Beta application Tower is a graphical front-end to the popular version-control system Git. If you've never heard of Git, it's probably not for you; if you're a Git user who wouldn't mind a more GUI-friendly Git, it looks very promising.

Save snapshots of frequently-updated files over time with programmer-strength version control—but without the learning curve. Free software Flashbake captures working files and adds details like the weather and your Twitter status to each version automatically.

Writer Rachel Greenham details how she takes advantage of version control tool Subversion—primarily used by software devlopers—to manage her writing projects. We've covered how to set up a Subversion server and how to use Subversion with TortoiseSVN (Windows) in the past, but Greenham's post has a Mac focus using previously mentioned SCPlugin. If you're a writer working in Windows, our TortoiseSVN guide will be a nice companion to Greenham's post. If you've used Subversion for non-coding purposes or you want to share your SVN experiences, let's hear about them in the comments. Subversion For Writers