[cvsnt] Online/Offline Backup of CVSNT respositories on Linux

Tony Hoyle tony.hoyle at march-hare.com
Mon Mar 26 22:15:10 BST 2007


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Luigi D. Sandon wrote:
> An offline backup is simply a copy of the repository, if you can ensure 
> noone is accessing it. You can take it "offline" stopping the server. You 
> can use any file copy utility to make a backup.
> 
> What you call an "online backup" is a replica actually, not a backup. An 
> "online backup" would be a coherent snapshot of the repository in a given 
> point in time - backups aren't modified once made, usually. I do not know if 
> there is a safe way to make an online backup.
> 
> AFAIK there are some tools to replicate repositories - don't know if there 
> are free ones. Be aware that an unreliable replication is worse than no 
> replication at all - I'd look for a good solution, not just a free one.
> 
It's worth noting that replication of a live repository is pretty safe - 
all the work in an RCS file goes on in a temporary copy, so if you 
replicate halfway through an operation you still get an intact version.

They one thing that you might get is half a commit.. in practice I've 
never found that to be an issue - it's fairly unlikely on most 
repositories (even busy ones do many times more checkouts than commits, 
although there may be exceptions) and if you're recovering from 
something like a corrupt server you've got worse things to worry about 
than one persons sandbox needing a second commit.

Tony


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