[Tfug] Using Subversion for my home dir

[Chris Hill]

Matt Jacob wrote:
> First, has anyone done this? And by "this", I mean kept your entire home dir in 
> a Subversion repository distributed across many machines. My backup timeline is 
> as follows:
>
>      a) started using rsync and some hacked-together scripts
>      b) progressed to unison
>      c) curious about how well svn might work
>
> I already use Subversion for versioning my development projects, so the learning 
> curve is nonexistent. TortoiseSVN works under Vista, and Vista is the reason I'm 
> looking for a different solution in the first place. (My new box at work is 
> running Vista, and unison doesn't seem to like it at all---can't really blame 
> it, though.)
>
> Here's the kicker, though: the size of my home dir is 61702716 bytes (i.e., 
> about 60 gigs). Approximately 37G is consumed by music, 19G by software and 
> ISOs, and 2G by pictures. Is that going to be a problem? I've never tried 
> creating such a large repository, but it doesn't seem like it should matter. The 
> aforementioned three dirs change fairly infrequently, but I need them to be 
> synced in the event that I rip a CD at work or slurp some pictures off a memory 
> card using my laptop, etc.
>
> Any thoughts? Ideas? Experience doing this?
>
> Matt
>
>   
Hey Matt,

For development I use svn too, but have not looked into setting up my 
home dir for backup. I think that for larger media SVN is not really the 
best. I have heard of people with 60G repositories and 10,000 but I 
would worry about corruption. Additionally, SVN creates a local 
duplicate of every file, which means your 60g repo becomes a 120g local 
copy. That's not very ideal for laptops (of course you don't have to 
check out everything).

This may sound unusual, but this is how i set up my stuff:

All of my 'media' exists on a RAID5 server. This server has a php 
website that allows me to stream music and movies to any computer. This 
is not for public use, its just for me. It dynamically creates .pls 
files which I have set to automatically open into Totem/Amarok on Linux, 
and Winamp on windows. Its slowish off my cable modem but adequate.

All of my 'development' exists in Subversion. Some people like 
monolithic repos, I prefer to have lots of little ones. I check out what 
I need when I need it.

Hope this helps!
C