Recommended backup procedure and preserving my data...

[Ian Clatworthy]

John Arbash Meinel wrote:
> John Szakmeister wrote:

>> Bummer.  It'd be nice to have a format, were I could be guaranteed to
>> get back the original repository.

It would.

> There has been some work to make this possible. The current main problem
> is that bzr can represent "ghosts" (revisions whose identifier we know,
> but where we do not have the actual content for the revision.)
> 
> The fast-export stream does not seem to have a way to talk about those
> sorts of objects. (The stream is based on git, where everything is
> addressed as the hash of the content, thus if you can hash it, you must
> have the actual content available.)

Ghost are one problem, yes. I suspect very few projects care about them
though.

> Aside from that, I thought Ian had round-tripping working. Though you
> would need to get that from *him*, since I've never done any experiments
> myself.

There are still some edge case bugs I'm yet to track down. Otherwise,
round-tripping ought to work for many branches. Some key things to be
aware of though:

* fast-export only exports a branch, not all branches in a repository
* the recreated repo is *semantically* equivalent but not internally
  equivalent - i.e. different file-ids and revision-ids are assgned

Ian C.