git backups interacting with git Wednesday 5th December 2007
This is really important!
git as a generalized backup utility interacts with and git repositories that it finds in an ‘interesting’ way.
It treats them as a submodule, so instead of backing up the git repository, it just records a reference to the current HEAD of the submodule.
I believe that this is “by design”, but if you don’t set up the submodule configuration your backup repository won’t know where to find the correct repository with the recorded commit.
It also means that you need to be git pushing your precious repository data somewhere safe in any case.
git backup is also about three times slower than my tar based incremental backup, although incrementally saving the backups to a remote machine is quicker and backup browsing and recovery is a little easier.
That’s enough to convince me to stick with rsync.