I've had to organise and enhance the verification files for a product to the satisfaction of a certification body (no cheating allowed). My starting point was a bunch of paper files that are the released versions with real, old school signiatures. The working files are obviously electronic files and dumped in the design history folder. The problem was finding which files corresponded to the released versions and who had done what to them (and why). There were about 6000 files in the folder, going back over 10 years.

Using revision control software would have given the following benefits.

1. You know for sure which version of a file is your working master. You don't have to worry about someone having a modified version on their local drive that they haven't put back on the server yet.

2. You can find what changes have been made to a document, and on a good day you can find out why (good log message).

3. When you discover you've misunderstood something and want to go back to your version before Friday lunchtime you can.

4. When someone wants to generate a special test version of the code they can branch the code instead of taking a copy and dumping another 309 files on the server.

5. Deleting files by accident just isn't a problem.