Re: git as a backup tool?

From: Russell <russellsteicke@gmail.com>
Date: May 15, 2007, 05:09 UTC
Message-ID: <c1b8b6670705142209x267e44cbrea26aa8818275aea@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0705141334120.20215@anakin>

On 5/14/07, Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org> wrote:

Show 7 quoted lines

>         Hi,
>
> Has anyone considered using git as a backup tool?  I.e.
>   - put your whole file system in git
>   - do `git add .; git commit -a' from cron
>   - copy .git to external media once in a while
>   - clean up old stuff (unused and older than xx days) from .git

I'm using git to backup my private email, all in Maildir format, in that manner. In addition, I push to a remote bare repository automatically, using ssh host keys.

The most annoying issue was trying to prevent spam getting stuck in the mail history. I do this by having the "unsure" mail folder in a different place, and then having a symlink from the mail store point there so mutt can still find it easily if needed.

Backing up a whole home directory would require careful thought about what _not_ to backup, similar to the spam issue. You probably wouldn't want to backup things that you download off the net and can easily retrieve again, like foo-1.2.tar.gz etc.

I'm not sure what you mean by cleaning up old stuff. git (or at least my usage of it) requires the whole history to be in the repository. I haven't looked at shallow clones or other ways to prune history.

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