I’ve reconsidered using git as my backup choice du jour. The main problem (and feature) of using git was having a checked out repo in my home directory. I found I was forever worried, given my admittedly horrid muscle memory habit of doing ‘git reset –hard’ periodically inside source trees, that I’d accidentally do it from the wrong directory and lose any recent work. Luckily, I never did that.
Two obvious solutions: don’t use a checkout in the home directory, instead using rsync to the repo; or use a wrapper/custom command name for the git-as-backup program to avoid accidents. Well, I went with the third option: use rdiff-backup like a normal person. It’s packaged by Fedora and Debian, so I only needed a small tweak to my backup scripts to make that happen every night. And someone wrote a FUSE filesystem (archfs) to mount the backups as normal directories, so there’s no real loss of convenience under this scheme.
My RPM database is now corrupted. Just in time.