From: Avery Pennarun <apenwarr@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 13 May 2010 00:31:32 GMT
Subject: Re: Advice on choosing git
Message-ID: <AANLkTikc6_jZoMzF1VhfJBSk1DRHCNNP3puPT0Z2Usk5@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201005130018.o4D0I7iI079145@kzsu.stanford.edu>

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 8:18 PM, Joe Brenner <doom@kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Noah Silverman <noah@smartmediacorp.com> wrote:
>> 1) Size.  THIS IS MY MAIN CONCERN - If I want to sync my home, office,
>> and server Document directories.  From what I have read, I will
>> effectively have multiple copies of each item on my hard drive, thus
>> eating up a lot of space
>
> Pretty much any version control system is going to have this problem,
> and it gets really bad if you've got any files that aren't straight text.

Note that most people probably don't need to worry about this
nowadays.  Disk $/gigabyte just keeps dropping and is now at
absolutely abysmally small levels.  You can only fill up your disks if
you download tons of movies and/or create tons of VMs.

If you're struggling with a laptop drive that's too small, just buy a
new one for $100 and solve all your problems.

So you're fine with storing multiple copies.  Just make sure your
backup/syncing software has an expiration algorithm so you don't end
up storing *all* the historical copies.

I'd like to adapt bup to support this usage model eventually.
However, I haven't yet written the expiration algorithm and it doesn't
yet support two-way syncing.  The fundamental design allows for this,
though, so it's just a matter of having some free time.  Meanwhile,
you might want to take a look at something like rdiff-backup.

Have fun,

Avery