Those are valid, and very real concerns. Learning by mistake is one of the quickest ways to learn something though. Personally, to mitigate the possibility of

Those are valid, and very real concerns. Learning by mistake is one of the quickest ways to learn something though. Personally, to mitigate the possibility of losing my hard work to this problem, I started using git for personal projects and didn't use it for my important work until I was comfortable with it (eg had run into several problems, but resolved all of them). This also helped me understand Git well enough to teach it to my colleagues (and in teaching others, you learn even more yourself), and now that everyone on my team is comfortable with it we've switched to it almost exclusively.