Introduction to my situation

I work for a small web development company. We have a team of four ASP.NET developers, including me. Almost all of our projects (> 98%) are one-person projects that take about 1-4 weeks to complete. We don't use source or version control. The only thing we have is a shared folder on a local server that contains the latest source (== the source of the live application) of all projects.

On the rare occasions that we do need to work on the same project with more than one person, we use... Beyond Compare. One or two times a day the developers ask each other if they have a version that compiles and then they synchronize their code using Beyond Compare. When only two people are working on a project, this works "rather well", but as soon as a third developers enters the process, it becomes an unmanageable piece of rubbish. Especially when everyone starts making changes to the database.

I (and one or two of my fellow developers) have already told my boss several times that we should start using some form of source and version control like Git, Mercurial or TFS (our boss is very Microsoft minded). Unfortunately, my boss doesn't see the advantage of switching to a source and version control system, because in his eyes everything works just fine now and he doesn't want to invest time and money in setting up a new system and making sure everyone knows how to use it. Even after I explained the advantages (like simplified collaboration, different versions of an application, safer way to change code, ...) to him, he still doesn't think it is something we need.

Of the four developers, only two (including me) have experience with source control (Git). And that experience is very limited. I know how to clone a Github repository to my computer, make some changes, commit them and push them back to Github. That's it.

Explanation of my problem/concern

In a few weeks we are going to start working on a rather big project for our standards. It will probably take 2-3 developers a few months to complete it. I will be the project lead (project manager and lead developer) and I will be responsible for everything. I've had my share of problems with our Beyond Compare approach and I don't want to take this road with this big project that will be my responsibility.

Since I doubt that we will be able to


set up our own Git server,
teach everyone to work with Git and
employ Git successfully in this big project,


I am interested if any of you know some good ways to allow multiple people to collaborate on the same project without using source or version control.

Update

I would to thank everyone for their answers and comments. Here is the plan:


Have a meeting with the developers to make sure all the technical people feel the same way about implementing source control. We'll make a stronger point when everyone is behind it.
Present the idea to the boss and tell him that we really need source control.
Implement it as soon as possible.


Please take a day to install version control and teach everybody on the project to use it. It's not that hard. Personally I've not used Git, but I have set up and used other version control systems and they are not that hard to get working. Make sure you choose one that integrates with your development environment. This will make using it virtually seamless.

This will not be wasted time.

The time you will lose when someone overwrites or deletes some code will cost you much more.

If you don't have version control you will also spend an inordinate amount of time backing up your project and worrying about which version everyone has and which version is on the server etc.

If you need to convince your boss make an estimate of the time that it will take you to set up and monitor any non-version control solution and add in the cost of rewriting a few days lost work. Don't forget to add in the cost of manually merging edits from 3 developers working on the same source file and the extra cost of getting that merge wrong. Good version control gives you this for free

Then compare that to the cost of getting version control - nil (if you go open source) and setting it up - 3 man days.

Don't forget that an error later in the project is going to cost more than one early on. If you have to redo the entire project because of a mistake anyone can make this will cost far more than just the rewrite time, it might cost your boss the reputation of his firm.
