On Tue, May 15, 2007 at 01:09:06PM +0800, Russell wrote: > On 5/14/07, Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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. > There was already a discussion about using git for backup in [1], which is probabily worth reading. For cleaning up old history Junio explained a very elegant solution in [2]. -Peter [1]: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/33887 [2]: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/34455 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
