no, it's often finding out the hard way that you have made a mess and it would be really nice to get back to the working state of an hour ago

It isn't that hard to just make a backup before you do anything messy. That's sorta what I'm getting at: people are using git as a really overcomplicated backup solution. It has the same problem: you forget to commit before making changes and you're still hosed.

Okay, but if you need to do "a backup" more than once, you will inevitably come up with your own shoddy versioning system, even if it consists of littering your project with files named "Copy of 2017-04-20_main_v1 (17).bak.new.old.bad.cpp~".

The alternative is just doing what you always do on every project: run "git init" and occasionally do a "git add -i && git commit". Even if you end up with a lot of non-descriptive snapshots name "WIP" at least you have something resembling a chronology and you can track changes across multiple files at the same time.

If your hobby projects mostly consist of single files with thousands of lines that are easy to unambiguously make copies of for backups, I won't judge you, but your experience is definitely not universal.

> The alternative is just doing what you always do on every project: run "git init" and occasionally do a "git add -i && git commit".

Or I just let my backup software handle it. Automated daily backup supplemented with manually initiated backup if I need a specific point-in-time snapshot.

This isn't rocket science.