Recommended backup procedure and preserving my data...

John Szakmeister john at szakmeister.net
Thu Oct 15 18:46:50 BST 2009


On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 12:47 PM, John Arbash Meinel
<john at arbash-meinel.com> wrote:
[snip]
> You *can* do a fast-export, but last I heard, it wasn't made as a
> 'round-tripping' tool. Meaning that you can export, and potentially
> import all of that history into a new repository. But the new repository
> will likely get all new revision ids and file-ids, and not be compatible
> with the old repository.

Bummer.  It'd be nice to have a format, were I could be guaranteed to
get back the original repository.

> If you *just* wanted a single-file dump of the whole history, you could do:
>
> bzr init empty-branch
> cd trunk
> bzr send -o ../big-dump.patch ../empty-branch
>
> It effectively generates the delta of your entire history, and puts it
> into the file. It doesn't work with multiple branches, though. (Well you
> can do them each separately, but you'll have lots of really big files
> when you are done.
>
> It also isn't optimized for this case, and will probably be quite slow.

I can imagine. :-)

>> Sorry for all the questions, but I'd like to seriously consider
>> rolling out Bazaar in our infrastructure.  I can't really do it
>> though, unless I can take care of these issues as well.
>
[snip handy script]

The script assumes that everything is in a shared repository... which
I suppose is a fair assumption.

> Note that this should be ~nice to your backup tapes. Bazaar will
> autopack the repository from time to time, but does so in an
> 'exponential backoff' fashion. So the *first* time you run this script,
> I would add a "bzr pack" just before $RUN_BACKUP_TO_TAPE.
> That should give you a single minimal pack file that gets backed up.

It doesn't need to be absolutely minimal churn... I can cope with the
autopacking.  We don't have much (in terms of size), but he have 50 or
more Subversion repositories at the moment.  And it seems to grow
every week. :-)

[snip]
> You can use 'bzr_access', you can use bzr+http + .htaccess files. You
> can use just "bzr://" access and just use firewall rules to restrict who
> can actually access the server.

Is that new?  I don't remember seeing that in the guides.  What's the
performance impact?

> It really depends how much access control support you really need. I
> think someone was also working on adding AC to 'bzr;//' but I don't
> think that is 'ready' in any sense.
>
> bzr+http might be your best bet here.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions John!  BTW, are any
of you guys going to be at PyCon?  I'd love to meet you.

Thanks again!

-John



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