Firstly, I'm not sure if this belongs here or programmers. Please move if it needs to be there.
I am mostly a hobbiest web developer, with a bit of freelance sidework. I program anywhere I can, from a laptop on the go to my home PC. I've pretty well settled on Net Beans as my IDE, and xampp for my test environment. My question is how do I best synchronize changes between my different PCs?
I started out FTPing changes to a "dev" area on my webserver, then FTPing them down to my other PC, but that's sort of a pain. Lately I have started using dropbox, which takes a lot of the pain out, but still isn't quite as seemless as I'd like.
Has anyone come up with a bulletproof way to easily ensure you're always opening up the latest version of your files across multiple PCs which aren't necessarily always (but sometimes are) on your home network?
Free is a necessity.
Learn to use a version control system.
www.github.com is free for open source projects, but must pay for private source repositories and also closed source projects, hurray.
http://unfuddle.com uses subversion, and is free for 200Mb of private source.
You may find some of the links in this thread useful.