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In my experience you rarely whack older branches or versions in source control. You may spawn a new branch, and kind of forget the earlier branches. But whacking them seems kind of rare to me.
Now the problem with binary files is that you're storing full images of the file -- as already noted. What I believe you can do is set a version roll-ovr where the system only stores so many versions of your files. I think the problem there is that it's global for the repository. So you can't keep your binary doc source in the same repository as the code. This isn't catastrophic, but developers tend to squirm at the thought because it violates their sense of source control. In the best of worlds, you can keep your doc source on the same track as the code. But that seems to require storing in a text format. Again, I refer you to the Oxygen integration of their XML with source control.
BTW, MIF isn't so great for that because it makes changes underneath your content changes, so the deltas are misleading.
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Yeah, backups are generally less disk-intensive, and it's possible for
older backups to be shifted from online storage to other storage,
which could cut hardware costs.
The same should be true of source control, if you're working on
version 5.x you probably don't need online access to 2.x.
I guess online storage has gotten so cheap that it's not worth the
effort. And occasionally it's very helpful to have an archive of
versions going way, way back.
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