backing up a repository over a network

Dear People,

I'm currently storing both my repository and my working copy on my home
computer. My connection to the net is currently dial-up, so I use rsync
over ssh to backup my data to a remote computer (remote) as follows.

rsync -avz --partial --delete -e ssh /home/faheem/svn/ remote:svn/

This is designed to produce an exact copy of the /svn directory. Now,
rsync doesn't know anything about subversion, so it is possible that it
could produce a copy that is a broken repository at the other end. In fact
this does happen, at least some of the time. I'm not sure why, because
rsync is usually very good at making exact copies.

In any case, I noticed there is a subversion script (hot-backup.py) which
does a repository backup that is intelligent, so less likely to give a
broken result. However, it seems designed for local use, and not for
networking.

So, I was wondering what was recommended for backing up over the network.

Furthermore, when doing these backups, I noticed an oddity. Suppose I

a) Run the backup script so local and remote repositories are the same.
b) Do a checkout from the remote repository.
c) Run the backup script again.

I would expect that no changes would be detected in c). In fact, the
remote repository appears to have changed, since the two are now
different, and the local repository certainly hasn't changed in the
meantime. This seems a little strange to me, since I can't see any reason
why doing a checkout should change a repository. Does it keep a note of
time of last access or log of activity or something like that?

                                                         Faheem.

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Received on Mon Jun 9 21:07:23 2003