Kind of related: What do you use to backup binary files like photos? At the moment I've just got copies on old USB drives, but I'd like to put something on AWS Glacier too.
The only catch is that you have to make sure to back up the (metadata-only) git repository itself also, and maintaining this backup on anything that is not a direct filesystem is painful.
[1] Through my tool, glacier-cli, for which git-annex has native support.
[2] I wrote ddar and the git-annex support for it.
git clone /my/repo /tmp/backup-git-annex
tar cvf /tmp/backup-git-annex.tar /tmp/backup-git-annex
> git-annex is not a backup system. It may be a useful component of an archival system, or a way to deliver files to a backup system
With this in mind, can we treat it as a backup tool? Assuming backing up the git repository itself as you mentioned.
- New photos live on my laptop (in my Dropbox and covered by Backblaze)
- I manually copy photos from my laptop to a RAID array on a server elsewhere in my house when I'm done editing/processing them
- The server backs up the photos to S3
S3 is the last bastion, so to speak. I expect that normally, I pull any photos I need back off my server. But the house burns down, I go to S3.
I run a cron job on my backup server that picks up all changed files (in my photo storage dir) and pushes them to S3 with s3cmd[1]. It's a pretty 'dumb' process, but works well.
The S3 <-> Glacier lifecycle stuff is pretty cool, so the plan is to eventually enable it to deep-archive older photos.