Re: Incremental Backup of repositories using Git

From: Michal Suchánek <msuchanek@suse.de>
Date: May 8, 2025, 18:47 UTC
Message-ID: <aBz8U35YX7UH-PTW@kitsune.suse.cz>
In-Reply-To: <PH7PR19MB70252D42F5D04FFC0331AB63C08E2@PH7PR19MB7025.namprd19.prod.outlook.com>

Hello,

On Mon, May 05, 2025 at 02:35:43PM +0000, 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?

If you have one of those filesystems that support deduplication on filesystem level you could make each snapshot as a full repository with all objects unpacked, and the filesystem would deduplicate the objects for you.

The downside is that you have no way to do multiple full backups this way, and you would have to use something else for that (such as those bundles, or plain archiving the repository as files in a tar archive or such.

Thanks

Michal