Backup my git on Gitblit

[ronnie]

Hi everyone,

I am pretty new to Git and just managed to install gitblit to my users, does anyone knows the best way to backup the git repositories?

Can I just copy the whole directory? Or have to use the federation mentioned in gitblit website?

Ronnie

[Glenn Matthys]

If you just want to backup the repositories, just copying the directories should do it, provided you can take a snapshot of the filesystem beforehand. Otherwise there might be changes while backing up. If you can't snapshot your filesystem, check out the "git bundle" command. A small script that loops through the repositories should do it then.

[yong]

Thanks, will give it a try.

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[Jamey Graham]

Since your direct question has already been answered, I'll tangent a bit and ask "why do you think you need to back up in the first place?"  For those new to Git and _especially_ those who've been conditioned on centralized VCSs, it's not always easy understand the full ramifications (benefits) of a distributed VCS, one of which is that every clone of the repo is a complete clone - every clone is a backup! (although to fully restore "origin" you may need to have a couple of local repos push to it - but you can ALWAYS restore origin from local clones)

If you decide to still run backups, that's fine - but make sure you have a "right reason" for doing it and that it's based on DVCS principles.  You're not going to backup to restore to a point in time - VCSs obviously do that themselves; you may not want to backup for disaster recovery purposes, since recovering from local repos may be easier (you almost don't even need to try to recover...whenever the next person does a push from a local, it'll just recreate everything on origin automatically [well...sortof...everything in the history of the commit being pushed]).   

NOTE that the same argument doesn't apply to GitBlit config directory!!!

[yong]

Thank you for the answer, it really clear my doubt!

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[Glenn Matthys]

I witnessed first-hand what a fire can do... You backup. Everything. YOU BACKUP EVERYTHING. Even with GIT or whatever versioning control system. No excuses.