I’m curious how others are managing their FreeCAD files. Ultimately, I would like to keep them in Git so I can store and keep versions.
I’ve seen that FreeCAD files are more diffable (?) if you store them with zero compression. A FreeCAD file is a zip file.
It would also be helpful if you could diff versions. I see this project which basically takes snapshots along the way and somehow is Git-aware.
I am using Time Machine on my Mac to my NAS if I need to walk back inbetween increments.
Otherwise, each project gets it’s own folder in my master CAD docs folder, and go by the “Save As” route and use the 0.0.1, 0.0.2, for major.minor.incremental. Then if I am smart about it I will add a “- Comments” on what the revision was, but laziness doesn’t always adhere to that part.
I really need to sit down and learn GitHub, but the way it’s set up still confuses the heck out of me. I am not a native coder so that may be this issue.
Yea, I’m doing the Save As route right now, but I don’t like it. Git at least forces me to enter a comment (commit message).
Feel free to ask questions about Git/Github. Git is pretty easy to get started but mastering it is hard, although you probably never need to.
I agree the file versioning is clunky at best. At least this is one step better than what I deal with at work…
And thanks, will do on git. If you moved to git would you store it in a local repository or use GitHub? Do they have file size limits - with versioning the repository would balloon pretty quickly?
I would put it on Github and that’s the nice thing about Git, you would have a local copy of the repository and sync it to Github.
Sounds like Github blocks files larger than 100 MB (although you can store 2 GB files using Git LFS). I don’t see a hard limit but it recommends less than 1 GB.
Really interesting, that would be more than enough for anything I would ever design.
Just read through the DiffCad, and now I think I am going to have to consider really sitting down and learning this and Git before I start my next large project.
I just have a Nextcloud so I don’t have to give it to corporate overlords. 
I thought of using git as well but definitely not suing github as is owned by microsoft. I ended up creating a million files with different time stamps for the same project and I host them on Proton Drive.
Yeah, that’s what I meant with the corporate overlords. 
They are just one of the few unfortunately the list of corporate overlords in too long for my taste 
Meh. I use tons of Microsoft products and services both personally and professionally.
There are other hosted git services like GitLab, Bitbucket, Codeberg, etc. For the purposes of this conversation, it doesn’t matter whether using a service like this or running git locally.
