repo backup

Hi,

I do every night
 a) hotcopies of my repos
 b) do consistency checks on the these copies
 c) and even create dumps (incremental on Mon...Thu and full on Fri).

I just ask myself whether it makes sense at all to create these "dum[pb]
files" for real backup purposes:

 1) They are generally much larger than the repo itself.

 2) One ends up with one large file which might get more easily destroyed
    due to backup media errors than all the little files in a hotcopied
    repo.

 3) I understood that future versions of svn (like 1.5) will be able to
    work on older repos. (1.5 might run a bit faster if you do a
    dump/reload cycle. So, one can use just dump the hotcopied-backup-repo
    and reload in the new repo.)

Any comments from the list?

Well, I have to add that I just had a hard disc desaster on my main
server. I had two sets of full backups. Unfortunately the HD error must
have corrupted the two largest tar.bz2-files in both backups containing my
most important CVS and SVN repos. Due to the easy-going dump/reload cycle
I was able to extract my SVN repos from the half-faulty server when it was
still able to access the erroneous HD. I had no time to recover my CVS
repos anymore, since the HD ceased to function just then.

Well, perhaps one should think about finding a more reliable way to backup
repos somehow... How to cope with flipping bits somewhere in the middle of
everything?

Regards,
Marko

P.S.: Am currently using svn 1.4.4.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe_at_subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help_at_subversion.tigris.org
Received on 2008-07-18 13:47:00 CEST