I am using GIT on a relatively small project and I find that zipping the .git directory's contents might be a fine way to back up the project. But this is kind of weird because, when I restore, the first thing I need to do is git reset --hard.
Are there any problems with backing up a GIT repo this way? Also, is there any better way to do it (e.g., a portable GIT format or something similar?)?
The other offical way would be using git bundle
That will create a file that support git fetch and git pull in order to update your second repo.
Useful for incremental backup and restore.
But if you need to backup everything (because you do not have a second repo with some older content already in place), the backup is a bit more elaborate to do, as mentioned in my other answer, after Kent Fredric's comment:
$ git bundle create /tmp/foo master
$ git bundle create /tmp/foo-all --all
$ git bundle list-heads /tmp/foo
$ git bundle list-heads /tmp/foo-all
Funny, I thought Git was a backup tool. I use a script to find each of my git repos and either clone (if the path is new) or pull from each one.
The way I do this is to create a remote (bare) repository (on a separate drive, USB Key, backup server or even github) and then use push --mirror to make that remote repo look exactly like my local one (except the remote is a bare repository).
This will push all refs (branches and tags) including non-fast-forward updates. I use this for creating backups of my local repository.
The man page describes it like this:
Instead of naming each ref to push, specifies that all refs under
$GIT_DIR/refs/(which includes but is not limited torefs/heads/,refs/remotes/, andrefs/tags/) be mirrored to the remote repository. Newly created local refs will be pushed to the remote end, locally updated refs will be force updated on the remote end, and deleted refs will be removed from the remote end. This is the default if the configuration optionremote.<remote>.mirroris set.
I made an alias to do the push:
git config --add alias.bak "push --mirror github"
Then, I just run git bak whenever I want to do a backup.
[Just leaving this here for my own reference.]
I liked git bundle and it answered the question. However, it's slow and the bundle is big. using zip is slow and the bundle is small.
In the end, I decided to go with Pat Notz's answer. So it looks like this:
Setup a Bare Repo
mkdir /myBareRepo.git
cd /myBareRepo.git
git init --bare
Push to the Bare Repo
git push --mirror /myBareRepo.git
Make an Alias
git config --add alias.backup "push --mirror /myBareRepo.git"
Use The Alias Intead of the Push Above
git backup
However I think the aliases are system-wide, so a name like "backup" would be bad news. Not sure yet. (This is wrong! If you don't use --global you're fine.)
Edit: Using this solution with a DropBox has to be the cheapest way to get a small repository backed up all the time... you could probably even share it. Although http://www.indefero.net/plans/ looks cheap too. Hmm...