Local history not found. what VCS do you use?

Ok I found the invalidate caches post from a few years ago but today I tried to use local history and it had nothing beyond today's activity. I will report the bug unless someone tells me not to. The question I have for the community is this: what versioning system is:

easy to install

easy to get going

easy to understand

and just works?

Local history was really just perfect for me but I can't rely on it (this cannot happen again for any reason) . So all I need is something that will keep versions and make it easy to compare them visually. I do have BeyondCompare and it's great but it's not a versioning system and obviously it's not integrated with Intellij. I need to keep versions indefinitely, disk space is no object.

Thanks.