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Well, not necessarily. The issue is that filesystem corruption lead to undetected Git repository corruption, which is what made it possible to push corrupted repos to the mirrors.

It would have been just as easy to push those corrupted repos to all of the backup tapes in the rotating snapshot set. A snapshotting filesystem could be a good backup (and seems to be what one of the sysadmins is pushing for).

But even more important is to fail fast and identify git repo corruption as soon as it can be detected so that further damage can be avoided.

Git is not an immutable data store. The refs are very mutable and change-sets get garbage collected.

The KDE sysadmins are well aware of that, at least. Mutable operations that would leave dangling blobs cause a backup copy of the appropriate ref to be generated before the force-push/branch-deletion/etc. are run so that there's nothing for git to garbage collect.

Yeah, if you're incapable of accepting that complicated scenario is complicated.

The next two paragraphs identified two things that they weren't doing that they should have been. Otherwise they'd just have lots of snapshots of bad data.