back

by pwim·16y ago·view on hn ↗
As a software development company, all of our code is in a git repository that has a remote on a VPS. Our documents are primarily Google docs. Important docs are checked into git.

Nothing we have locally that is important is not also at some remote location.

2 comments
I assume you are using git to manage your home directory. I use gibak[1] for the same(built on top of git). Out of curiosity, what is your setup like?

[1] http://eigenclass.org/hiki/gibak-backup-system-introduction

Thanks, that is great feedback. Maybe so much is web-based now that backups aren't really relevant.

Is there any pain associated with restoring your dev environment? How long would it take you to get your text editor reinstalled, color scheme set back up, system preferences back, etc.?

Almost everything I care about is managed via git. That includes editor and shell configs and ~/bin -- restoring my own dev environment is so easy, I just randomly do it on different computers.

Every time I make a change worth saving and want to share it, I push it to gerrit, which means there are now two copies (one on my laptop and one "in the cloud" on my gerrit server).

Every time a change is reviewed, verified, and blessed as part of our code base, the reviewer or verifier pushes a button to submit the change, it's automatically sent up to github, github fires webhooks that automatically replicate the data down to a machine in the office, another copy on our build master (also in the office), and then, shortly after, another copy on every build slave.

Internally, files are stored via nfs or smb onto a solaris box that takes snapshots every 15m. Those snapshots are not stored externally.

The biggest part of our data, though, is made up of vm images. Big files that change a lot. Restoring them hurts, but anything that loads up IO on that box makes vmware think the NFS server isn't responding and it unmounts and remounts it (it even does this when nothing's using it -- though the NFS server itself works fine for other clients during this time).

I wouldn't mind a backup procedure there, but it'd have to not break that.

(sorry to not use your form... the further down I got, the less it applied to me)