Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
At Big Ladder we train energy modelers to use version control for their models. This is important for keeping a history of changes, but it also makes collaborating on a model much simpler than the old "original file name + my initials + date" approach to sharing files.
We have hosted SVN repositories for several modeling firms, and, if they are working on windows, we will set them up with TortoiseSVN as one of the more intuitive graphical interfaces for version control.
We also use SVN in-house to keep templates for the different components of the building input file that we re-use often. Each template is then referenced by a master file for a specific building model. This workflow has really streamlined the whole modeling process for us.
That said, there is definitely a learning curve for version control. I suggest easing into it with a very basic system (like Dropbox, which will keep a history of changes) and then progressing to SVN which enables more collaboration as projects become more complex and require closer tracking of changes and have multiple contributors.
If you still feel like you need more capability for forking and merging, you can look into Git, but I feel it would be a bit overkill for an energy model. One thing in Git's favor is that there are several good sites that offer free hosting (though I'm sure you can find some decent SVN hosting sites as well):
