The importance of source control (git, svn, mercurial etc etc) is not as keenly felt by a solo developer, but imagine doing what you do in a team of developers, all trying to SFTP their own copy of the code to a server. Unworkable.

Once you start using git, even on your own, you begin to see how useful it is. You commit small, well-named units of work, and you can see the history of what you wrote. Maybe you don't like a commit and you revert it. You can go back in time to any point. If you want to work on one feature in isolation, while having a stable branch that you can make hotfixes on, you can create a branch. This is very easy to do in git.

If you want to work in any sort of team, learning source control (especially git, as it is very commonplace these days) is vital – and it is extremely useful just on your own too.

That's because you have never worked in a team. :-) Read up on version control systems. Also, learn to use text editors other than notepad (emacs, vim, sublime, whatever). You can quickly become hire-able if you learn all the things that will make you valuable when working as part of a larger team.

[ ] You want to use git (which allows for pretty awesome workflows)[1]

[ ] You want to keep some external backup you can rollback changes from.

[ ] You want to allow other people to collaborate with you.

[ ] You want your work to be more visible.

Check as appropiate.

[1] See http://sandofsky.com/blog/git-workflow.html, and http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ for an example.

Exactly as he said, think of it as your public portfolio. Honestly, though, if you want to modernize, you should set things up so you can just git push to your web site to deploy new code to it, not FTP. Many organizations require all code that hits production be committed to source control. If you think about things from a business perspective, it's insane not to have a source control logged revision of exactly what's running on the machine. When something goes wrong the machine may not be accessible. When something goes wrong, someone will have to lookup what the latest changes were. When something goes wrong any one particular programmer may not be available.

I just started using Git and Github myself... and for me, github itself is useful as an online backup for a repository (git itself being incredibly useful in terms of organizing projects) and just having a github profile looks better on your resume, etc than not having one. At the very least, your code is right there to be looked at.

"Why should I use version control?"

http://stackoverflow.com/a/1408464/93995