On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 09:44:39AM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
On 17 Feb 09:10, Chris G wrote:
Doesn't rdiff-backup do it rather better in some ways as it's specifically designed as a backup system as opposed to being a code control system.
It gives you a basic 'replication' backup so its easy to restore in the case of failure of the original but in addition stores a history of changes so that, if you want/need to, you can go and get an older version. You have various controls that allow you to set how long you want to keep the history for as well.
Depends on what you're backing up and what you want out of the backup...
(Of course, I'd say that a single svn tree isn't a backup, and that you'd want backups of the svn archive, but hey ;)
If you're dealing mostly with text/source code then using svn as the store is a perfectly good idea, and likely to save a fair amount of diskspace as time goes on - only the diffs would be stored, not a whole copy of the file. On the other hand, it means that there's no *easy* way to trim the backup to the last 10 days, for example.
I think rdiff-backup stores diffs rather than complete copies of changed files so makes similar space savings. I agree completely that for text and source a code repository makes sense because it's characterised for exactly that requirement.