While file systems provide operations like open, save, rename and delete, version control systems provide checking-in and checking-out. Like their file system counterparts checking-in stores a file version, and checking-out retrieves a file revision from the system.

Upon checking-in a file, the system notes the current date and time, the name of the user submitting the revision, and prompts the user for a log message to be stored with the version. Unless otherwise explicitly specified by the user, the version control system automatically increments the version number.

With checking-out, a complete copy of a file is retrieved from the version control system. The user can usually specify the version number or specify some other attribute, like revision date and time. If no information is specified then the most recent version of the file is made available.