February 09, 2006

Subversive Backups

Kasper Andersen wrote in with some interesting ideas on the backup front:

Actually I use Subversion for backing up all files (both sourcecode and other files as well), using the Windows explorer extension allows easy manual adds/commits + browsing of your repository.

You can get subversion hosting plans in a wide range of prices. I run it off my own server (which again is backed up - using a real backup system to different datalocations) - therefor I have no recommendations on the "best value" shared host.

Kasper included some of the benefits of this approach:

  • It's fast.

  • The 3rd party client tools works really great, and outperform any backupclient tool in ease of use (for MS users it integrates into the winexplorer very nicely - and some equivalent tools for osx/linux are probably available).

  • It works cross OS.

  • It's easy to set up on the client.

  • Besides "Just doing the backup", it's a great developer tool, which amongst many other features - integrates into my different IDE's (Visual studio/Eclipse).

  • You are able to browse your files online.

  • It offers logging and statistics (which are great if you sometimes mark a commit/backup as being special - commenting when backing up sometimes makes sense, other times - it does not).

  • It is collaborative/team enabled, you are able to share working files this way without worrying that data might be overwritten, lost or outdated.

  • It is open source - it's mature - a lot of people use it - which basically means, that the software itself will continue to evolve and improve AND that the ecosystem of 3rd party software is doing the same, most of which are free (as in free speech) - of course you should do some appropriate donations.


Sounds good. Of course, I should warn readers that one needs to have bit of a technical inclination to take this approach. I haven't looked, but it would be interesting to see if anyone has built any sort of automatic backup functionality into any of the Subversion client. If not, that sounds like a good project for someone out there in open source land.