[SATLUG] etc and home in version control

[Daniel J. Givens]

David Kowis wrote:
> git works quite well. Cheap branches, cheap repos. Little bit
> different paradigm than cvs or svn.

I was looking at git and bzr. I use svn a lot and have bumped up against 
its shortcomings. I haven't looked into either of those, but the 
distributed version control systems definitely look interesting.

> Git does. :) handle permissions and ownership i mean. 

Apparently, bzr has some support as well, but I don't know if it's stock 
or through a patch.

> I don't think
> I'd VCS my home directories tho. Those could be big and scary. Backups
> would be better in that case. Guarantee weekly restore points.

Well, I'm not looking to replace backups, at least not with /etc or 
/home. I'm going to backup my home and etc dirs no matter what. I'm 
stuck with the issue of my media storage. It's nearly a terabyte and I 
mainly want to be able to selectively restore files if I accidentally 
delete the wrong thing. I don't want/can't afford to mirror all of that 
data at this time.

The only feasible way I could see this working in a version control 
scenario without unnecessarily eating up space over time is to have some 
way of selectively deleting back revisions.

Example:
My roughly 900GiB of storage space...

Rev 1. - Added 400GiB of data
Rev 2. - Deleted 200GiB of data      # 400GiB still used
Rev 3. - Added 250GiB of data
Rev 4. - Deleted 100GiB of data      # 650GiB still used
Rev 5. - Added 150GiB of data
Rev 6. - Added 50GiB of data
Rev 7. - Deleted 50GiB of data       # 850GiB still used
Rev 8. - Tried to add 75GiB of data  # Fails due to insufficient space

If I could go back and remove the information on Revisions 1 through 5, 
or at least the metadata (correct usage?) associated with those, to free 
up 300GiB of space, I wouldn't have to worry quite so much about running 
out of disk space. I could at least manage it while keeping some history.

The fact of the matter is, I've spent a ton on drives as it is. I can't 
afford what it would take to backup all of my storage space, let alone 
room for a couple of weeks of archives. I'm just looking for a 
not-as-good, but functional alternative.