Google Drive plus Git

Collaboration is a multiplier for our achievement in the era of the Internet. I have heard about GitHub for a long time but just started using GitHub intensively last month. In contrast, I have been constantly using Google Drive since 2013. It is not a "either/or" question. On the contrary, we can leverage the power of both.

Generic Solution for Sharing and Synchronizing Files: Google Drive

GitHub is a popular and well-known tool for IT people when it comes to collaboration in coding. You can simply find tons of reasons convincing people to manager and store their coding scripts using GitHub. However, most of my friends who are not intensively involved in coding have not considered about it. Honestly, I don't use GitHub very often because of two reasons:

1. I use Google Drive which also allows me to retrieve files from the cloud,
2. I am not worried about version control. If needed, I will make a copy and title it using an extended name with a time stamp.

I am always enthused to collaborate with other scholars in doing research and have had pleasant experience in writing academic papers with my co-authors. Most of time, we will divide a long list of tasks into parts, one for each. It is a quite efficient way to do research and a file storage and synchronization service provided by Google Drive (or One Drive and Dropbox) is good enough for us. In my past experience, there is few chance, if possible, that multiple people would work on the same part of a coding script.

Version Control Solution: GitHub

Probably, it is not a good idea to store numbers of copies in a local archive folder. These copies might waste the space in our drive. As a result, there are quite a few times that we need to consider about version control and think of the potential maintenance and further development of existing programs. For example,

1. I need to fix a problem in an existing script and update it when the problem is resolved, and
2. I might also work together with colleagues on a big project and write some scripts that will be shared within the team.

GitHub Desktop or Git

GitHub Desktop is a Git GUI client for Windows users. It is user friendly and easy to manage your files in local and synchronize them with the copies in GitHub online repositories.

I began my GitHub journey with GitHub Desktop. Since most of my recent work involves in using a Linux server with command lines, I switch to Git and find it worth to spend some time in learning how to use it.

Git is small and fast. Written in C and built to work on the Linux kernel, it has had to effectively handle large repositories from day one. According to its official introduction page, speed and performance has been a primary goal in the design of Git from start. Note that it can also be used in Windows Command Prompt.