One for the nerds....

[tyggerjai]

So I now have 2 or 3 machines I use for tinkering with the little projects I have, and I'd like to keep the code synched. There are many tools for this, of course, and I'm not wanting to start a religious war about which tool I should use, but rather seeking advice on how to use them best :)

Assume, for the sake of argument, that I have access to git and/or subversion. Assume, for the sake of argument, that I have a ~/Code directory, which has, of course, a Python directory and a Perl directory, which then contain project directories and library directories.

Assuming for the moment that I don't care so much about synching "broken" code - in that I want to be able to half-finish something on the desktop, commit it to the repo, and check it out on the laptop to keep tinkering - as much as I care about the latest version, is my best strategy to commit ~/Code en masse and then just update en masse?

Or should I commit each project individually to the repo, so I can branch later if need be?

Comments

[thorfinn]

Oh, and I have to say, if you really do want to misuse a code repository for keeping directories in sync, I believe git is actually designed around being a distributed code repository rather than centralised, which makes it slightly better.

Still not as good as Dropbox because you have to remember to push/pull/run-script-to-sync, but not everything fits in Dropbox. :-)

[ideological_cuddle]

but not everything fits in Dropbox.

It does if you give them (enough) money. ;)

I mainly use Dropbox for an offsite backup of my music collection, so I've paid for a 100GB account. It works pretty well in that role and I don't have to think about it all once it was set up, it just automatically syncs properly.

[thorfinn]

Well, that is true. :-)

I'm more thinking that if you're compiling a project that involves regularly creating and destroying hundreds of MB of libraries, or working with editing multi-GB media files, Dropbox is not going to help you much... if only because sending all that crap up to .us even once (assuming the other machines are local so they do LAN sync) is going to take forever. De-duplication may or may not help, but I wouldn't like to bet on it helping. :-)

Personally I'm very happy with http://crashplan.com/ as my emergency cloud backup provider and I really hope I never have to do a catastrophic restore (of all machines), but it's there just in case. I did do a full crashplan restore of my linux VM when that died horribly, but that was a mere 13GB. :-)

Dropbox I'm keeping just for "a small amount of stuff I like to sync", so the free GB is fine for me so far. I'd be happy to pony up for a bit more if I needed it though.

[ideological_cuddle]

Yeah, in that instance you'd either do your builds in a different directory (which is something the gcc people like to do, if memory serves) or use selective sync. I think the former is probably a cleaner solution, you're already going to have to make sure that your binary files go into a subdirectory rather than sitting alongside the source anyway...

I like that Dropbox will also sync across the LAN if it can, so it takes care of both the remote backup and the rsync-like cases. At this point anything I care about winds up in TM, on Dropbox, and synced to a second machine via Dropbox-over-LAN. I feel *reasonably* safe.

[tyggerjai]

Ahh, that explains the (LAN) message I sometimes get. That's pretty awesome, given that my usual use case is indeed a desktop downstairs and a laptop upstairs.