[SATLUG] etc and home in version control

[Daniel Givens]

I'm in the process of setting up a couple new systems, one is my new
desktop and the other my home server. I've been considering setting up
some sort of version control system to aid me in tracking changes to
my /etc and /home directories. I know this isn't exactly what a VCS is
made for, but I think it would be a good way to save my butt in those
times that I accidentally fsck up a config or decide I need to roll
back some changes I made to a document. Yes, I saw the article on
Slashdot yesterday talking about the Linux equivalent of Time Machine.

I know most VCS's don't handle permissions and ownership, so that
would be a problem. I've considered writing a hook script to take an
inventory of the permissions, ACLs, and ownership at commit for easier
restoration. While not a major limitation these days for any modern
VCS, it would need to support binary files as well. Ideally, I would
like to be able to do an auto-commit of sorts on certain files or
directories.

I would also like to be able to do something like this with my media
storage. The only problem is that ~900GiB is a lot of data to backup
short of spending even more than I already have on disk space. While I
have that stuff stored on a RAID 5 volume, that doesn't protect me
from an accidental rm -rf /srv/nfs/media/ when I meant
/srv/nfs/media/pr0n/. If I were to use a VCS in this instance, I could
easily restore the accidentally deleted files. The downside being I
wouldn't free up any disk space when I delete something because of it
still be held in the repo history. A good workaround for that would be
an option to drop old repository data after a certain span of time.

So am I asking too much? Do I need to get to work putting together
something to fit my needs (and does anyone feel like helping)? This
seems like something that wouldn't be too much to ask for and crazy
useful.

Thanks!

Daniel