2011-03-04 16:31:01 +00:00
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Imagine putting a git-annex drive in a time capsule. In 20, or 50, or 100
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years, you'd like its contents to be as accessible as possible to whoever
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digs it up.
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This is a hard problem. git-annex cannot completly solve it, but it does
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its best to not contribute to the problem. Here are some aspects of the
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problem:
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* How are files accessed? Git-annex carefully adds minimal complexity
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to access files in a repository. Nothing needs to be done to extract
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files from the repository; they are there on disk in the usual way,
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with just some symlinks pointing at the annexed file contents.
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Neither git-annex nor git is needed to get at the file contents.
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2011-03-05 19:58:57 +00:00
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(Also, git-annex provides an "uninit" command that moves everything out
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of the annex, if you should ever want to stop using it.)
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2011-03-04 16:31:01 +00:00
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* What file formats are used? Will they still be readable? To deal with
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this, it's best to stick to plain text files, and the most common
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image, sound, etc formats. Consider storing the same content in multiple
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formats.
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* What filesystem is used on the drive? Will that filesystem still be
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available?
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* What is the hardware interface of the drive? Will hardware still exist
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to talk to it?
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2011-03-09 05:56:24 +00:00
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* What if some of the data is damaged? git-annex facilitates storing a
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configurable number of [[copies]] of the file contents. The metadata
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about your files is stored in git, and so every clone of the repository
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means another copy of that is stored. Also, git-annex uses filenames
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for the data that encode everything needed to match it back to the
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metadata. So if a filesystem is badly corrupted and all your annexed
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files end up in `lost+found`, they can easily be lifted back out into
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another clone of the repository.
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