A common way of using CVS and other more advanced VCSes is to set up a central repository on some Internet host, then have each developer check out a personal working copy of the files on his local machine. Committing changes to the repository, and picking up changes from other users into one's own working area, then works by direct interactions with the repository server.
One difficulty is that access to a repository server is often slow, and that developers might need to work off-line as well. While only third-generation decentralized VCses such as GNU Arch or Mercurial really solve this problem, VC is designed to reduce the amount of network interaction necessary.
If you are using a truly decentralized VCS you can skip the rest of this section. It describes backup and local-repository techniques that are only useful for Subversion and earlier VCSes.
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