Comment by anaphor
6 years ago
Replication is not a backup as was already mentioned. A great example of this is when the KDE project almost lost all of their Git repos because they were mirroring a corrupted copy of the data. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMzNTc
Fortunately, git is a DVCS, so anyone who checks out a repo has a complete copy of it.
Now, granted, it'd be a huge pain to track down all the people who had copies of the 1,500 different repos, and try to find as up-to-date as possible of a version of each, but I doubt they got anywhere close to potentially losing all their source code.
Incidentally this shows why it's a good idea to sync your repo to GitHub, even if the canonical repo is elsewhere: in addition to the usual reasons of incentivizing some contributors by giving them "GitHub credit", and increasing visibility of your project's code, GitHub can serve as a backup!
Also, on a side-note, 1,500 separate repositories?! That sounds way overkill. I wonder if they'd benefit from having a monorepo.
> 1,500 separate repositories?! That sounds way overkill. I wonder if they'd benefit from having a monorepo.
No it doesn't. Github has at least 20 million public repositories. Would they benefit by combining them into a monorepo?
GP is talking about the KDE project, not the entirety of GitHub.
And yes, a monorepo is usually the best approach in most cases for a project or even an entire company.
A backup is a replication of the live dataset, although, usually out of sync to be useful when the main dataset goes bad.
You might want to read the Wikipedia definition, because you're technically mistaken.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup
That's a long article; please quote the part you're referring to so we're all looking at the same text.
> a backup, or data backup is a copy of computer data taken and stored elsewhere so that it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event
Since a "replica" is a copy, that seems technically correct.
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I'm not, you can't do backup without replicating data, hence, if you do backup, you are doing replication.
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The out of sync part is rather important when something accidently get deleted from the live dataset.