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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> because I sync’d them to a usb stick with gitea

Just a tip: no need to use gitea if you want to replicate a git repository to somewhere else on disk/other disk.

Just do something like this:

    mkdir /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo
    (cd /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo && git init)
    git remote add backup /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo
    git push backup master

And now you have a new repository at /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo with a master branch :) It's just a normal git repository, that you also can push to over just the filesystem

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Even better with

    cd /media/run/usb-drive/my-backup-repo && git init --bare

Bare repositories don't have a working directory. You can still git clone / git pull from them to get the contents. You can also git push to them without clobbering any "local changes" (there aren't any).

More detail here:

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/setting-up-a-reposit...

Yeah, better in terms of saving space, but I think it confuses some people, hence I didn't use it in my above example. Previous time I recommended a co-worker to use the `push to a directory` way of copying a git repository, I made them create a bare repository, and they ended up going into the directory to verify it worked and not seeing what they expected. Cue me having to explain the difference between a normal repository and a bare one. It also confused them into thinking that a bare repository isn't just another git repository but a "special" one you can sync to, while the normal one you couldn't.

So in the end, simple is simple :) Unless you're creating remote repositories at scale, you probably won't notice a difference in storage usage.

I hear all that, but --bare is necessary in this case because git (by default) won't let you push to a non-bare filesystem branch:

    ~/temp/a:master  $ git push backup
    Enumerating objects: 3, done.
    Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
    Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 212 bytes | 212.00 KiB/s, done.
    Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
    remote: error: refusing to update checked out branch: refs/heads/master
    remote: error: By default, updating the current branch in a non-bare repository
    remote: is denied, because it will make the index and work tree inconsistent
    remote: with what you pushed, and will require 'git reset --hard' to match
    remote: the work tree to HEAD.
    ...
    To ../b
    ! [remote rejected] master -> master (branch is currently checked out)
    error: failed to push some refs to '../b'

  git clone --mirror
  git clone --bare
  git push --mirror
  git push --all

"Is `git push --mirror` sufficient for backing up my repository?" https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3333102/is-git-push-mirr... :

> So it's usually best to use --mirror for one time copies, and just use normal push (maybe with --all) for normal uses.

git push: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-push

git clone: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone

You can even take it a step further and have a push to origin update your backup as well.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/14290145

> In recent versions of Git you can add multiple pushurls for a given remote

Woah, that's really cool, didn't know about that. This is really useful! Thanks for sharing that.

Gitea has a cron task that pulls-in changes on an ongoing basis.

If a snapshot suffices, a once off "git push" or "git clone" works (but that's not too far off from downloading a tar ball, is it?). If you want to have a up-to-date local copies of multiple repos, a SQLite-backed Gitea instance is the simplest solution.

An added bonus to using Gitea is flexibility in mirroring LFS objects, which can be sent to S3 or minio

> a SQLite-backed Gitea instance is the simplest solution

Agree to disagree :)

This seems like the simplest solution:

    git remote set-url --add --push origin git@github.com:my-user/my-repo.git
    git remote set-url --add --push origin /backups/repos/my-user/my-repo.git

Now when you push to origin, it pushes to your local backup as well, everything up to date, no external sosftware at all :)

Thanks dabber for sharing this trick (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34603174)

This does not include the cron jobs to pull in changes others make daily/weekly/every N hours. I mentioned that Gitea is superior under very specific conditions (where one wants to have latest version available locally).

I did not realise you could set the remote's URL to a local filesystem path.

That opens some interesting possibilities.

Cheers

Have you tried running gitea? It's very light on resources, has good documentation, and also defualts to a main branch. It's also very easy to control where all the data is stored, and works well w/ sqlite.

Is the "main" branch an advantage? I guess only if >50 percent of your repos use "main" branch

The biggest reason to do this is thah it supports "mirror" repositories where it will keep your copy up to date, even using github keys to get at a private repo if you want.

Yes, and if you stop the process and start it again, gitea doesn't complain and picks up right up where it left off. Ditto if you lose internet connectivity. It's a well-designed piece of software. I considered using it as a BaaS and am actually thinking again of using it as one.

Yes, I've tried it (and actually run a personal instance myself), but I would never try to run an application meant as an webapp when I want to copy something from one filesystem to another, when git can do it already without any external programs.

Also, the `master` is just an example, it works for `main` as well, don't worry :) The created git repository on your usb-stick works like a regular git repository, you can use whatever branch names you want.

Btw, way to focus on the absolutely least interesting part of my comment, what I chose to name the branch...

You can change the default default branch on GitHub via <https://github.com/settings/repositories>.

I believe new GitHub accounts now have that set to main.

The same works also over SSH using user@host:path for the remote - you don't need a deamon running on your server to push to it.

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