Josh Carter has written an interesting blog post comparing the virtues of various version-control systems for synchronizing and, well, version-controlling your home directory. It's here.
Version control is designed to be used for source code, but the idea of having versioned backups of your .vimrc and documents, easily synchronized across all the machines you might work on, is a pleasant idea.
Back in 2002, Joey Hess was using CVS for that job; he's since moved to Subversion, and now provides etckeeper, a tool to version-control your /etc directory using your choice of DVCS systems.
I was excited to discover git-home-history, a Git-based tool that is made to work with home directories; but it seems to have fallen into dormancy mere months after its birth. Git-home-history's successor appears to be Gibak, also built on Git and with etckeeper's support for metadata. I haven't tried that one out yet.
The next great hope is ZFS, the megafilesystem designed by Sun and currently held up by licensing incompatibilities. ZFS has some version-control ability built right into the filesystem.
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