Re: Git as a backup system?

On Mon, 8 Nov 2010 13:01:29 -0500
Eric Frederich [off-list ref] wrote:

I maintain a corporate MediaWiki installation.
Currently I have a cron job that runs daily and tar's up the contents
of the installation directory and runs a mysqldump.
I keep backups of the past 45 days.
Each backup is about 200M, so all in all I always have about 9.0G of
backups. Most of the changes are in the database, so the mysqldump
file is changed every day.
Other than that, there can be new files uploaded but they never
change, just get added.
All configuration files stay the same.

[...]

Am I insane?  Are there other tools more suited toward this?
I just thought of using Git since I looked at my 9G worth of data out
there in my backup directory that is almost exactly the same and said
"git could handle this well".

Are any of you using git for a backup system?  Have any tips, words
of wisdom?

I suspect the rdiff-backup tool [1] was invented precisely for the setup
like yours: it is able to sync one directory to another + create diffs
between them thus providing for incremental backups.

1. http://www.nongnu.org/rdiff-backup/