On Mon, May 05, 2025 at 02:35:43PM +0000, Akash S wrote: > Hi, > > Currently we are backing up repositories using the "git clone -bare" command and save it to disk. If we want to restore, we just run git push -mirror from the repo that was saved during the backup. > > Currently we are running full backups (run git clone -bare) everyday, which is taking a lot of disk space and time. > > Are there any possible ways to backup only the incremental changes of a repository? And somehow construct the whole repository when we want to do a restore from the incremental backups? Hello, first, to make it easier to update the backup the clone should be done with --bare --mirror. If your clone ends up having multiple packs and loose objects you can reduce its size with git --git-dir=/path/to/clone repack -adk This should give you a repository with a single pack and no loose objects. The -k (or --cruft) option is required, using only -ad seems to corrupt repositories quite reliably. To speed up the clone next time around you can make a copy of the previous backup and fetch from the remote repository but because there is no safe way I am aware of to eliminate no longer referenced objects you will accumulate cruft this way. This is now a complete backup, and should be made readonly to not get corrupted with further operations. The inrementeal backups are somewhat speculative, I have not tested this at all. You can create a shared clone of the full backup, update the origin URL of the shared clone to the remote repository to backup, and do a fetch -p (which now should do the right thing because the initial clone was set up as mirror). To repack you need to use the --local option in addition. With this you should have a valid repository for each backup with the incremental backups sharing most objects with the full backup. These can be inspected with git commands, exported over gitweb, or whatever. Thanks Michal
