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Re: Any thoughts on using Subversion as a general backup tool?

From: Ph. Marek <philipp.marek_at_bmlv.gv.at>
Date: 2004-06-01 08:36:53 CEST

> I was curious as to what sort of experimentation might have been done
> with
> using Subversion as a general backup tool, and if people have
> thoughts/comments/
> suggestions etc. My guess is that is probably not quite suitable for
> such
> use, but I'm wondering...
I'm currently looking to implement svn as a backup tool for my home use.
I've had a look at svk too (svk.elixus.org).

My problems with this tools are:
- svn needs .svn-directories, which take up much space
- svk (and svn) import fetch the whole directory tree and don't know about
exceptions
- both don't know about symlinks, devices, etc.

I know about asvn
(http://www.contactor.se/~dast/svnusers/archive-2003-08/0255.shtml)
but that's a shell-script and therefore too slow for my wants.

So I'm currently writing a perl-script which accesses a svn repository and
does the following things:
- reads the latest head trunk
- compares against the directory tree (mtime, size, ev. md5sum)
- commits changes into the repository.

I'm about to store the directory contents which can't be represented in a svn
repository (like symlinks and devices); apart from checking for multiple
links to the same inode I also plan to automatically detect moves and copies
(with modifications), by storing/verifing the md5sums and manber-hashes (see
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/manber94finding.html)

A very important point is to support a source/target list with exceptions, so
I can specify "backup ~ as /trunk/home, but not ~/.firefox/default/*/Cache"
and so on.

Hey Kenneth, how about volunteering? :-)

Regards,

Phil

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Received on Tue Jun 1 08:37:40 2004

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