I've been using Subversion recently to manage our code projects and documents at work. It's been a relief to know we can roll back time in case of catastrophe or plan dumb file dragging mishaps.
Because of the size of our documents repository (the none code repository), I checked out sub-folders rather than checking out the root. Inevitably, I created a 'svn status' running nightmare. I now had four directories to check and update instead of one.
Low and behold, Subversion has a handy non-recursive feature on the checkout command, so one quick 'svn co --no-recursive ...' (or 'svn co -N ...') and I was back in business.
Handy stuff, this open source.