Advantages/Disadvantages of server-less Subversion for solo developer

Question

TortoiseSVN is good for this?

What about best practices to work fine?

Any special care about tricky issues using that way?

Answer 1

For a single developer it is ok.
But I strictly discourage from using it with more than one developer.

The SVN book says:

Do not be seduced by the simple idea of having all of your users access a repository directly via file:// URLs. Even if the repository is readily available to everyone via network share, this is a bad idea. It removes any layers of protection between the users and the repository: users can accidentally (or intentionally) corrupt the repository database, it becomes hard to take the repository offline for inspection or upgrade, and it can lead to a mess of file-permissions problems (see the section called “Supporting Multiple Repository Access Methods”.) Note that this is also one of the reasons we warn against accessing repositories via svn+ssh:// URLs—from a security standpoint, it's effectively the same as local users accessing via file://, and can entail all the same problems if the administrator isn't careful.

(From: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn.serverconfig.choosing.html)

Installing svnserve isn't that complicated and it's really worth putting an hour or two in configuration.

Answer 2

Obvious downside: even if you're using RAID so you've got redundancy on the disks, if your computer is lost or stolen, you're hosed. If you've got the source hosted on a server somewhere, then if either the server or your client machine gets stolen, you'll have another copy. (Admittedly if the server is stolen you'll lose history and branches, but it's better than nothing.)