Question

I have an unusual idea to use git as a backup system. So let’s say I have a directory ./backup/myfiles and I want to back that up using git. To keep things clean I don’t want to have a .git directory in the myfiles folder, so I thought I could create ./backup/git_repos/myfiles. From looking at the git docs, I’ve tried doing this:

$ cd backup/myfiles $ mkdir ../git_repos/myfiles $ git --git-dir=../git_repos/myfiles init Initialized empty Git repository in backup/git_repos/myfiles/ $ git --git-dir='../git_repos/myfiles/' add foo fatal: pathspec 'foo' did not match any files 

You can see the error message I get there. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

git --git-dir=../repo --work-tree=. add foo 

This will do what you want but will obviously suck when you have to specify it with every git command you ever use.

You can export GIT_WORK_TREE=. and GIT_DIR=../backup and Git will pick them up on each command. That will only comfortably allow you to work in a single repository per shell, though.

I’d rather suggest symlinking the .git directory to somewhere else, or creating a symlink to the .git directory from your main backup directory.