Netbeans has had this feature for about a decade and I use it all the time for exactly the reasons suggested. I was pleased to see that IntelliJ has the same feature. The resolution doesn't need to be more than a couple of minutes. Netbeans will keep a couple of weeks of local history and prunes the old history down to one or two snapshots a day. It can get a little confusing if you are checking out vastly different versions of the same file from different branches since it doesn't record what branch you were working on at the time, but it nonetheless very useful.