Is bazaar suitable for my purpose?

[Matthieu Moy]

Robin Haswell <rob at digital-crocus.com> writes:

> I run the backup procedures for my collection of web programmers - we all
> work on one (big) tree. They use FTP and I work on the server. Our
> backup consists of a daily backup on alternate disks that goes back a
> few days, nothing more.

I doubt a version control system would bring any added value compared
to a backup tool.

The real benefit of a version control system is the merge capability
(merge, update, ...), which you don't need here. A good backup tool
will help you to have different granularity backups (like: hourly
backups archived for one or a few days, daily backups archived for 30
days, monthly backups archived forever, ...), which will be harder to
achieve with a version control tool, which usually needs to keep all
the history (well, Bazaar can deal with ghost revisions, but removing
a revision from your history after the fact is not possible AFAIK).

I think a revision control tool is designed to be used interactively.
Running it from a cron job will most likely show some problem after
some time (you have to be _very_ carreful not to have silent failures.
For interactive use, if commit tells you ERROR: I'm not commiting
because of XXX and YYY, it's fine. For cron jobs, if such error
message is written to a log file that you'll only read the day you
need to recover from a backup, you're dead).

OTOH, a version-control tool would probably be a really good
replacement for your flow "everybody works on the same tree, with
ftp". I mean, _in addition_ to a backup tool.

-- 
Matthieu