Re: Incremental Backup of repositories using Git

From: Justin Tobler <jltobler@gmail.com>
Date: May 5, 2025, 16:18 UTC
Message-ID: <2dz3cema2mr5mrlvuroemnyeqyrglxfmusfdz2kaghv6rvj3ro@ti2dhu45fdmr>
In-Reply-To: <PH7PR19MB70252D42F5D04FFC0331AB63C08E2@PH7PR19MB7025.namprd19.prod.outlook.com>

On 25/05/05 02:35PM, Akash S wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

> Hi,
> 
> Currently we are backing up repositories using the "git clone -bare" command and save it to disk. If we want to restore, we just run git push -mirror from the repo that was saved during the backup.
> 
> Currently we are running full backups (run git clone -bare) everyday, which is taking a lot of disk space and time.
> 
> Are there any possible ways to backup only the incremental changes of a repository? And somehow construct the whole repository when we want to do a restore from the incremental backups?

You could look into using git-bundle(1) to create incremental bundles using exclusions. Examples:

  # Creates a bundle containing the last 10 commits for main.
  $ git bundle create inc-backup main~10..main

  # Creates incremental bundle based on time for all references.
  $ git bundle create inc-backup --all --since=7.days

These bundles can then be "unbundled" into a repository as long as the repo contains the required prerequisite objects.

-Justin

> 
> Thanks,
> Akash
>