On Fri, May 09, 2025 at 01:13:36PM +0200, Michal Suchánek wrote: > 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 Also with the --mirror option, it's not transferred. > 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 >
