

Using git as a backup for any system provides 2 big advantages: At the bottom of the post, I show the scripts I use to configure on a Windows system.

I use git as a backup for my Windows system, and it's been incredibly useful. You can solve this by writing tools to record this information explicitly into your repository, but it can be tricky to get this right.Ī Google search for git backup metadata yields a number of results that appear to be worth reading (including some tools that already attempt to compensate for the issues I've raised here).Įtckeeper was developed for backing up /etc and solves many of these problems. file permissions (other than "is this executable").The biggest issue with using git for backup is that it does not preserve most filesystem metadata. Basically, since git is not using a delta storage mechanism, it doesn't really care what your files look like (but the utility of git diff is pretty low for binary files with a stock configuration).

Read this page from the Git Book for more information on this topic. Using git as a backup mechanism can be attractive, and despite what other folks have said, git works just fine with binary files.
