A few years ago, a small business owner told me about a freelancer he'd hired to build his website. The work was good. The site launched, looked great, and brought in leads. Then one morning, the freelancer texted him a photo of a smashed car window. His laptop bag was gone, stolen from the front seat while he grabbed a coffee.

The business owner wasn't worried at first. A stolen laptop is the freelancer's problem, right? Then he asked a question that changed everything: "Do you have a backup of my website's code somewhere else?" The freelancer went quiet. The answer was no. Every file, every version, every late-night fix lived only on that one machine. If it hadn't turned up (it did, eventually, in a pawn shop three towns over), the business would have had to rebuild its entire website from scratch.

That close call is more common than most business owners realize. And it raises a question worth asking about your own website or software, right now: if the person who built it lost their laptop tomorrow, would your code survive?

Where Your Website's Code Actually Lives

Most business owners never ask this question, because they never think about code as a "thing" that lives somewhere. You think about your website the way you see it: a page in a browser. But behind that page sits a folder full of text files, written by a person, sitting on a computer.

If that folder only exists on one laptop, your website is exactly as safe as that laptop. A spilled coffee, a hard drive failure, a theft, or a developer who accidentally deletes the wrong folder can wipe it out in seconds. Nothing quietly makes copies in the background unless someone sets that up on purpose.

This is easy to miss because nothing about it looks fragile day to day. Your site works fine. It loads fast. Customers find you through Google. None of that tells you how many copies of the underlying code exist, or where they are. Fragility, in this case, stays invisible until the day it isn't.

What Version Control Actually Does

The fix for this has existed for decades, and it's simpler than it sounds. It's called version control (Git is the most common tool for it today), and it does two things that matter to you as a business owner, even if you never look at a line of code.

First, it keeps a saved history of every change. Every time a developer finishes a piece of work, they save a snapshot of the whole project at that moment, with a short note about what changed and why. If a new update breaks something, a developer can rewind to the exact version that worked, instead of guessing their way back to something stable. Nothing gets overwritten and lost. It gets added to the timeline.

Second, and just as important, it keeps synced copies of the project in more than one place. A developer using version control usually has a full copy of the code on their own laptop, and another complete copy sitting on a remote server, hosted by a service like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. When they finish a piece of work, they "push" it to that remote copy. If the laptop is stolen tomorrow, the code isn't gone. It's sitting safely on that server, with its entire saved history, ready to be pulled down onto any new machine.

That's the real value in plain terms: a saved history you can rewind, and copies that don't all live in one place.

A Simple Everyday Example

Picture a bakery's online ordering page. A developer adds a feature that lets customers schedule pickup times. She tests it, and something about it breaks the checkout button on mobile phones. With version control, going back to that morning's version takes minutes. Without it, someone has to manually hunt through the broken code and guess which lines to undo, hoping they remember what it looked like before. One path is a quick fix. The other is a stressful afternoon, possibly with the site down while customers try to order.

The One Question Worth Asking Any Developer

You don't need to understand version control to protect yourself. You just need to ask one question, early on, to anyone who builds or maintains your website or software: "Where does the code live, and can I see that it's backed up in a second location?"

A confident developer will have a quick answer. They'll point you to a private repository (that's the technical name for one of those remote copies) on a platform like GitHub or GitLab, and they can usually add you or someone at your company as a viewer on that account, no coding knowledge required. If the answer is vague, or the code only exists on their personal computer, that's worth fixing before it becomes a problem, not after.

This is a different question from who legally owns your code, which I've written about separately in what "owning" your source code really means. It's also different from your broader disaster recovery plan, covered in why every business needs a software continuity plan. This question is narrower and more basic: does more than one working copy of the code exist right now, with a history behind it?

Why This Is Cheap Insurance

Here's the part that should make this an easy decision. Setting up version control costs almost nothing. GitHub and GitLab offer free private repositories for small projects, and even paid plans run a few dollars a month. Any developer worth hiring already uses it as a normal part of how they work, the same way a contractor keeps receipts and blueprints. It shouldn't be a special request. It should be a given.

The laptop story from earlier had a lucky ending. The freelancer got his bag back a few days later. But luck isn't a backup plan, and you shouldn't need to find out the hard way whether your website's code exists in more than one place.

If you're not sure how your own website or software is set up, that's a quick, low-stakes conversation to have. Let's talk through your situation.