GIT remote server for single developer, does it make sense?

Question

At work we're only 2 developers, and for the most part we each work on independent projects. So I get the need for a centralized server if we were to share code (and that's still questionable seeing as it's only 2 of us and I doubt we'll ever get a 3rd wheel in this company). It'd also make sense for 'backing up' purposes I suppose, where every so often I could push the most stable code to the server, so if my laptop died or gets stolen I'd at least have the most stable state of the project somewhere else. But other than these reasons, for a single person development project, should one care for a centralized server?

Say it was just me for my personal projects, should I get a centralized repository, or would I be just fine committing and managing the whole nine yards on my PC and be done with it? Is it just a matter of preference?

Answer 1

When working on some projects alone I found that the hourly/daily snapshots of dropbox is the feature i used the most when it comes to the backup part of the question. This is not provided by git afaik.

After working on dropbox only for a while I added a remote git-repo to be able to show some code to others.

So far i have only utlized the git functionality for some minor branching, which could have been done localy, but IMO the "cost" of going for git is not whatever you decide to push to a remote repo, but to learn the basics of a version control system.

Answer 2

My opinion is that it does make sense.

I use a central server (mainly github and bitbucket) so I can get backups, easy sharing across all of my computers (without the possibility of forgetting which repo is the authority), access control, automatic web ui, integrated wiki plus other tools even when I'm doing a project just by myself. With a central server, I can plug it into a CI (continuous integration) system without putting load on my own computer, and CI helps to diagnoze any issues fast even if it were just me and my code.