Tag Archives: git

Differential Backups using Git Bundles

There are a lot of self-hosted file and data backup solutions out there, most of which are clunky to set up and configure correctly. Many simply tar your whole directory and let you download a huge archive. Others will store snapshots “in the cloud”.

I like minimal, self-contained solutions. One excellent tool is, of course, rsync, which offers incremental file transfers, which is pretty neat, and saves space by only saving changed files from last checkpoint. This type of backup is usually referred to as incremental backsup. For your media collection or user file uploads this is great. But space can be saved even more if most of the changes are inside the files. This is where differential backup comes in. rsync doesn’t do differential backups. Moreover, there seems to be no straightforward access to history, diffs, etc.

Differential Backups using Git

“history”? “diffs”? Sounds like version control…

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Multiple Development Environments on One Domain

While it’s true that distributed development should be managed by source control, with each participating party pushing or issuing pull requests from within their own environments, this is sometimes not possible.

Participants might not be able to setup their own development environments in light of many possible reasons and limitations. So remote development environments are usually setup for such participants so that they can work on their own forks of a project without interfering with others’ work. S/FTP/S is usually used, due to their inability to use version control remotely.

Here’s an interesting strategy that came to mind that allows participants to have their own environments on one single domain, single server, with the ability to switch between them without having to edit their hosts files or any other magic.

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Merging Raw Source Trees With git

Today I had the “pleasure” to manually merge two versions of the same application that was maintained in two different instances by three different programmers without any version control whatsoever.

The versions were quite different, with directory names changed (for now apparent reason) and all sorts of other funky stuff. Manual merging seemed like the only way to go and I chose git branches as my merging headquarters.

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