If you start to look at versioning now you will not regret it later! It’s one of the biggest improvements you can make to your development workflow.
You work locally. Commit files as they change, and they are then deployed (even automatically, if you are happy with that) to your live server.
I recommend you look at something like http://www.beanstalk.com which makes version control less scary.
Once you have this working, you can enhance it with Chrome plugins like “Server Switcher” and simply snap between local and live servers on the fly.