How to let Mercurial treat local repositories as ordinary files

Lester Caine lester at lsces.co.uk
Thu Jul 12 18:27:51 UTC 2012


Markus wrote:
> Up to now, it was an illuminative discussion on backup solutions, but
> I still only see very few light wrt my original simple little
> question.

I think you partially miss the key point here. hg uses a set of hidden files and 
folders to store information on all of the changes made to that data. It works 
most efficiently with text files as it can simply store the 'patches' required 
to create each version of the file. If it can't create a 'patch' then it has to 
keep a complete copy of each binary file, which is where there has been some 
moves to support the sort of thing you asked for. However what you are asking to 
do does not make any sense given the way hg actually stores the history data. 
Storing that data in a totally unrelated area of the disk could be practical, 
you would still need something to tell hg where to look?

Now if the whole area you want to manage is contained one level down, you would 
not have to worry about the overhead .hg directory. That would work, but is 
still not directly addressing your 'backup' requirements. (And BeyondCompare 
does not become part of this either ... that simply allows one to identify files 
which have changed, not back them up).

At the end of the day are you simply trying to back up all the changed files on 
a disk to another location? Which is rsync ... Or are you wanting to record each 
version of a file change and be able to select a particular version? In which 
case the history has to be stored somewhere ...

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk





More information about the Mercurial mailing list