push vs. bundle vs. tar zcvf — to backup entire local .git

Question

I can backup my local .git by pushing it to a repository in two steps:

git push --all ~/gitrepo
git push --tags ~/gitrepo

I can back it up

Answer 1

Regarding tar: It saves everything: the config (remote URLs), the reflogs, etc. You might want the reflogs if you accidentally do something really stupid in your repository and your hard drive crashes shortly afterwards. Far-fetched, but tar is easy and it does everything. Use tar for making backups, use git push for making mirrors. These are different kinds of tasks.

Regarding compression: I have a 27M git repo, almost entirely plain text, and the .tar.gz is... also 27M. That's not a whole lot of savings.

Answer 2

I use Git bundle

git bundle create /tmp/backup.git --all --tags --remotes

You can receive it as if it were a repo:

cd myworktree
git pull /tmp/backup.git

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But also see

• How to update a git clone --mirror?
• "fetch --all" in a git bare repository doesn't synchronize local branches to the remote ones
• Git doesn't clone all branches on subsequent clones?

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Completeness, notes

For complete backup (thing of git-rerere cache, stashes, hooks, configuration files) I suggest using rsync

rsync -hxPavilyzH --stats --delete .git/ backup@remote:/repo/mirror.git/

Alternatively:

• Is it possible to push a git stash to a remote repository?
• copy the rerere cache directory

Answer 3

The tar method is a possibility, but it won't check the integrity of the saved repo: you won't know if that compressed repo would work until you uncompress it and try to clone or fetch from it.

I prefer the clone --mirror approach (with reflogs enabled in the resulting bare repo).
And the incremental backups are then simple push.
As debated in this old thread, a git stash before a backup might allow you to save more (index and working tree state)