using bazaar for backup and synchronization of home directory

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sep 14, 2012, at 09:48 AM, Gary Furash wrote:

>1. has anyone tried backing up some or all of their "home" directory
>(whatever you consider that to be) to a bazaar repository? That way, you
>would have (1) an automated backup and (b) great history and (c) easy
>synchronization across devices.

d) Really easy deployment to new machines.

Yes, I've been doing this for years and it's fantastic.  Actually, I've done
it with previous vcs's such as Subversion and CVS before that, but using
Bazaar is by far the least painful of the bunch.  I essentially keep all my
~/.??* files ~/bin and ~/env (which holds all my personal emacs and random
files) under Bazaar, with the repository on an internal server that gets
backed up to my NAS.  Using bzr+ssh allows me to do pulls and pushes even when
I'm remote.

Here's the trick that works for me.  When I have a new desktop, I basically do
this:

$ cd /tmp
$ bzr branch bzr+ssh://repo.example.com/home/repos/barry/base
$ mv base/.bzr ~
$ cd
$ bzr revert

No complaints, and it works perfectly.

>3. would 1 prohibit you from using your companies' source control sytem
>(e.g., git) for subsets of items

I can't speak to that, but I do have lots of directories under ~/projects that
live in just about every open source vcs in existence, and I never get any
interference.  It even works great on my mixed environment of Linux and OS X
machines.

FWIW, I also used to do the same with my system's /etc files.  I still do, but
I use etckeeper on Ubuntu to manage those repos (with an occasional manual
push to my internal repo server).

Cheers,
-Barry
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/bazaar/attachments/20120914/89151a12/attachment.pgp>