Joshua: Add me to the people saying "No, it doesn't seem like overkill at all." All my personal documents are in a version control system. At least, all the ones that I actually edit. I don't do it for digital photos and music and other things that are quite large and are effectively write-once, but it would be trivial to do it for a readme.txt file in the photo directory nonetheless.

One of the other cool things about version control that Rands didn't mention is this: it's like rsync, but better. Any time I stop using a computer, I check in my changes. Any time I'm about to use a computer, I run an update. I have my documents scattered over a home computer, a laptop, and an office computer, yet keeping everything up-to-date on all of them takes no thought at all.

And, related to that: Last year, my laptop crashed and wouldn't boot. Half my doctoral dissertation was on it, and this looked like a failed hard drive. My reaction was, "Drat, that will be a bit annoying to fix." I didn't worry about lost data at all -- everything on it was backed up and up to date on the version control server.