Recently, I was working on creating a website on a cloud-based IDE (CodeHS). One night, I was editing, and then when I was done, I simply turned off my monitor and disabled my mouse and keyboard. Then, the next day at school, I continued to work on the website, and made significant changes. When I got home, I made more significant changes, but then realized something very important. What I realized is that when I continued to work on the project at home, the cloud-based IDE hadn't refreshed to the new code, and overwrote the work I did at school when I saved my new work.
So, what is the purpose of me telling you this? Is it to say that you should always close your code editor when you're done working, or some other trick to prevent this from happening? No, it definitely is not.
After the initial panic, I realized that the cloud-based IDE had a history section, which has a detailed log of every change that happened to every file. I then looked back at my old copy, copied the changes, and put them back into my new code.
Now, imagine you aren't using a cloud-based IDE, and your just editing a file on your computer, in an IDE, or simply your terminal. To clarify, Git is not cloud-based, it is local, (sitting on your computer), that connects to the cloud (GitHub). What happens when something breaks? For some environments, this could be catastrophic, and make you loose a lot of work. When you make an update to a file, the last state and all the states before it are gone.
