Re: [gentoo-server] Git as backup tool

[Dmitriy Petrov <i.am.corpix@gmail.com>]

Yeah. But `git log` is pretty good :)

On 11/02/2011 04:39 AM, Tanner Danzey wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-11-01 at 19:19 -0500, Brian Kroth wrote:
> Not to mention finding a previous snapshot.
> "deffee46b0ef8c504498a002443ab23019ee0cc9" isn't really a very good
> indicator of when said backup was taken. :P
>> Tanner Danzey<arkaniad@gmail.com>  2011-11-01 18:50:
>>> Generally, using git is a bad idea for backups (from what I've read)
>>>
>>> git stores it's data uncompressed and inefficiently. If you are backing
>>> up things like configuration files or web pages that can change a lot,
>>> sure, but for storing binary files with git, I'd recommend against it,
>>> since binaries vary greatly from version to version (unlike text files)
>>> and you'd just accumulate tons of useless binaries. programs like
>>> duplicity and rsync are great for backups, though.
>> Agreed.  There are lots of other spin offs, each with their own pros and
>> cons: rsnapshot, rdiff, etc.  I personally use some homegrown perl,
>> rsync, and zfs snapshots (transparent compression, dedup, each snapshot
>> looks like a full backup, etc.).  I'm sure you could use something like
>> btrfs in that scheme as well.
>>
>> However, using git, hg, svn, whatever, for storing your config file
>> repositories for something like cfengine, puppet, whatever is a good
>> idea, but that's a different issue than backups.
>>
>>> in all, the drawbacks outweigh the benefits of using a code management
>>> tool to back up entire systems...
>>>
>>> On Tue, 2011-11-01 at 23:16 +0200, Andrey Utkin wrote:
>>>> Hi all! Long live the gentoo masters!
>>>> I'd like to hear from anybody who uses (or tried) git on production
>>>> servers for saving the points of possible restore. Please, share your
>>>> practices, like commit patterns, .gitignore contents, etc. I've begun
>>>> to use it a couple of days ago for that, and pointed out some issues.
>>>> I control the whole root fs with git.
>>>> The problematic part is bunch of files that update frequently, but i
>>>> am not familiar with them and i'm not sure if system will load without
>>>> them.
>>>> Namely, these are files in /usr/lib64/portage/pym/
>>>> Also wtmp, utmp files hurt - likely without them box won't boot, but
>>>> they shouldn't be in git control, too, coz they update often.
>>>> Thus, backup restoring requires not git repo only, but also some tar of base?
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