Alex Harford wrote:

>> What Shawn told you is a diff, not a backup. A diff between two revisions
>> is not really an "incremental backup". And one shouldn't do backups of a
>> sandbox anyway, you should do backups of the repository. Which has nothing
>> to do with what Shawn wrote.
> 
> I disagree.  

With what exactly?

With "What Shawn told you is a diff"? Apparently not. 

With "A diff between two revisions is not really an 'incremental backup'"?
Usually you do incremental backups to save space and time. Usually, storing
diffs exported from a repository doesn't do either. (For one thing, it
duplicates every removed and changed line.) That's why I said that there is
a difference between storing a diff and what's usually called "incremental
backup" -- even though file diffs can be used for that. But probably not
efficiently.

Why wouldn't you take simply a backup application (or suitable script) and
run it over the repository? After all, the OP didn't ask about clever ways
to abuse version control systems as backup, he asked how to backup the
repository :)

> Alan, I think you are confused about how Subversion works... when you
> get the difference between two revisions in a repository, it gives you
> a text file that lists only what has changed, line by line.

That's not a special feature of subversion... pretty much all version
systems do that. A handy feature, and one in the core of any version
system. But not really a good backup method, IMO.

Gerhard

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