git-annex/doc/future_proofing.mdwn
Joey Hess e213ef310f git-annex (5.20140717) unstable; urgency=high
* Fix minor FD leak in journal code. Closes: #754608
  * direct: Fix handling of case where a work tree subdirectory cannot
    be written to due to permissions.
  * migrate: Avoid re-checksumming when migrating from hashE to hash backend.
  * uninit: Avoid failing final removal in some direct mode repositories
    due to file modes.
  * S3: Deal with AWS ACL configurations that do not allow creating or
    checking the location of a bucket, but only reading and writing content to
    it.
  * resolvemerge: New plumbing command that runs the automatic merge conflict
    resolver.
  * Deal with change in git 2.0 that made indirect mode merge conflict
    resolution leave behind old files.
  * sync: Fix git sync with local git remotes even when they don't have an
    annex.uuid set. (The assistant already did so.)
  * Set gcrypt-publish-participants when setting up a gcrypt repository,
    to avoid unncessary passphrase prompts.
    This is a security/usability tradeoff. To avoid exposing the gpg key
    ids who can decrypt the repository, users can unset
    gcrypt-publish-participants.
  * Install nautilus hooks even when ~/.local/share/nautilus/ does not yet
    exist, since it is not automatically created for Gnome 3 users.
  * Windows: Move .vbs files out of git\bin, to avoid that being in the
    PATH, which caused some weird breakage. (Thanks, divB)
  * Windows: Fix locking issue that prevented the webapp starting
    (since 5.20140707).

# imported from the archive
2014-07-17 11:27:25 -04:00

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Markdown

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