A webmaster designs a web site. Sometimes, he experiments with several different styles on his site, and wants to be able go back if the modifications are not satisfactory.
Each day, he adds the current version on the SmartVersion file for his web site. On days when he tries several modifications, he saves several versions of the web site inside the SmartVersion file (adding new versions to a patch). The website contains a lot of HTML files and images in the form of JPGs and GIFs, all contained inside the SmartVersion file.
Before the webmaster discovered SmartVersion, he had created 10 ZIP files containing 10 different versions of his website. But now, he just creates a single SmartVersion file with all these 10 versions. He imports his exising ZIP files (adding new versions to a patch) into a new SmartVersion file (starting with an empty patch). And he discovers that while the ZIP files together took up 10 MB, the SmartVersion file just takes 2.5 MB of space, and neatly contains all his website versions!
When he is done with his site, our webmaster has a SmartVersion file with, say 40 versions. At any time, he can extract one or several files from any of the versions (extracting versions from a patch). Let's say he wants to keep an archive of the evolution of his web site...but he doesn't want to keep all the versions of the site either...no problem! The webmaster selects the, say 10 versions he wants to keep, and then creates a new SmartVersion file for safekeeping (building partial patches).
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