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> Be aware that even with these recommendations, syncing in this way has some risk since it bypasses Git’s normal integrity checking for repositories, so having backups is advised. You may also wish to do a git fsck to verify the integrity of your data on the destination system after syncing.

https://git-scm.com/docs/gitfaq#_transfers

It doesn't tell you how to make a backup safely though.

On a personal scale, Syncthing and Btrfs snapshots work plenty good enough. It's as fast as the storage/network too.


Syncthing is the only way I've ever corrupted a git repo before
I think that's why they specified the "BTRFS snapshots" part. Yes, directly syncing a .git directory seems like a recipe for disaster with how often I've seen individual files lagging to sync, but I guess with BTRFS snaphots one can ensure that only a consistent view of a git directory is being backed up and synced.
Nah I truly do it the wrong way around. Syncthing on the git repos. And one of my device in the Syncthing cluster does btrfs snapshots minutely for recovery and further backups.

Because it's at a personal scale, the only time I can corrupt a git repo is if I work on the same repo (and it's workdir) from more than one device in the time it takes for Syncthing to replicate the changes.

But even then it's not a big deal because git fsck is quick. And I have my snapshots, and the syncthing versioning, and git defaults to two weeks before pruning. And because of how git works, using hash to identify contents, files are not easily overwritten either.

In 10y I only had one git corruption (I ran a command on the same repo on a different machine via ssh, yielding a synctning conflict). Syncthing kept copies of the conflict file. One commit disappeared from the history but not from the database. It was easy to rebase the changes. I think I used git fsck to deleted the syncthing versioned files.

If filesystem snapshots weren't safe, wouldn't that also mean git is prone to corrupting your repo in the event of a power loss or crash? That seems like a bad bug.

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