Introduction/Overview

FAIR Principles recommend that you track everything that happens to your project. Version control systems provide you with tools to track changes in the most efficient way possible. Not only do these systems keep a history of the file versions, but they also allow you to annotate that history so you know why each change was made.

This lesson describes two free open-source version control tools:

GIT is used for tracking changes in text documents, especially scripts and other code. GIT has been around for many years and was preceded by other version trackers before it, though it has largely supplanted those older version trackers.
Datalad is much newer than GIT and is built on top of GIT. It extends GIT to tracking data (like large neuroimaging files), and it is used on many data repositories. Datalad development comes out of the neuroimaging community, although Datalad is useful for any kind of data, not just neuroimaging.

In separate practices, you will work with GIT and Datalad.

Version Control 1 (5)