Re: Git as a backup system?

From: Konstantin Khomoutov <flatworm@users.sourceforge.net>
Date: Nov 8, 2010, 18:26 UTC
Message-ID: <20101108212612.bb4bfeb8.kostix@domain007.com>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikcBvN+5hkcc9+xt291B4Gm+Yhe53R3qY0PNt97@mail.gmail.com>

On Mon, 8 Nov 2010 13:01:29 -0500 Eric Frederich <eric.frederich@gmail.com> wrote:

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> I maintain a corporate MediaWiki installation.
> Currently I have a cron job that runs daily and tar's up the contents
> of the installation directory and runs a mysqldump.
> I keep backups of the past 45 days.
> Each backup is about 200M, so all in all I always have about 9.0G of
> backups. Most of the changes are in the database, so the mysqldump
> file is changed every day.
> Other than that, there can be new files uploaded but they never
> change, just get added.
> All configuration files stay the same.

[...]

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> Am I insane?  Are there other tools more suited toward this?
> I just thought of using Git since I looked at my 9G worth of data out
> there in my backup directory that is almost exactly the same and said
> "git could handle this well".
> 
> Are any of you using git for a backup system?  Have any tips, words
> of wisdom?

I suspect the rdiff-backup tool [1] was invented precisely for the setup like yours: it is able to sync one directory to another + create diffs between them thus providing for incremental backups.

1. http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/