Does it make sense to use a distributed VCS (DVCS) to work on research code?

Question

I work in a small research team, and we have been debating whether is it worth it to use Git – or any other DVCS for that matter – to control our research code. The thing is, most of the research is developed in jupyter notebooks, and 99% of the time every member is working on its own code, which is never modified by other colleagues. With that in mind, does it make sense to account for all the Git “bureaucracy” involved in collaborative working (pulling, pushing, merging, etc.), or should we just have a centralized development environment?

Answer 1

It makes sense to use a VCS, even when working alone, for the sheer benefit of "rolling back to when it worked" and "compare these two versions".

If you don't have anything to do that yet : use git.

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You don't need to have a github account or a git server or anything, you can start local (git init), and only git commit.

Your first "remote" can be a copy (an actual file copy) of your project on some other disk, so that git push becomes your one shot backup command.

Perhaps you won't need the sharing part yet, but when that time comes, well, your team will have some experience with git, and some git history to share.