http://subversion.tigris.org/

Subversion is a free/open-source version control system that can manage files and directories, and more importantly the changes made to them, over time. This allows you to recover older versions of your data, or examine the history of how your data changed. Subversion can operate across networks, which allows it to be used by people on different computers. Although Subversion is traditionally used as a software revision control system the more interesting use from a SOX perspective is to maintain version control on system and application configuration files. It is very simple to setup a repository and use this for in place editing of configurations at the source, without the maintenance headache of using a document management system such as KnowledgeTree. With subversion to maintain your configuration files you basically:

• Change directory to where the files to be maintained are

• Create a "module" for the files you want to version control

• Use subversion commands to either commit changes you have made or

• Use subversion commands to rollback to a previous version.

We will have a closer look at the above procedure to maintain the apache configuration files as an example, but first let's explore subversions main features:

• Directory versioning Some other version control systems such as CVS only tracks the history of individual files, but Subversion implements a "virtual" versioned filesystem that tracks changes to whole directory trees over time. Files and directories are versioned.

• True version history With Subversion you can add,...