Over time, I’ve accumulated quite a few projects on my hard drive. And while I like having them there, I always feel it’s a very fragile place to keep them. Yes, I do back up – less often than I should. But even then, it’s just an earthquake away from being gone.
So ideally, I’d like to have my code in an offsite repository, in addition to what I have locally. Putting my eggs into multiple baskets, so to speak.
The simplest solution would be to install GIT on my dreamhost account. (Shameless plug: If you sign up with them and use the promo code GROBY, you get $50 off your fees, and I’ll make $47 towards my hosting costs.) Autopragmatic has an excellent account on how to set up git on dreamhost. That’s not quite what I want though. First of all, quite a few git repositories are my actual web sites – hosting them with your service provider seems to defeat the purpose.
The next option coming up is hosting my git repositories on S3. Unfortunately, the only options I am seeing involve using S3 as a file system – i.e. using s3fs on OSX. Again, not a very appealing option to me – if I host my code in the cloud, I want to be able to get there from anywhere.
Next up on the cost scale: InDefero. It is an open source package that provides both git & svn hosting, and adds bug tracking/code review on top. And on top of all that, they give you free hosting with 250MB storage. Downside? 6 months of inactivity, and they drop your account. It’s probably good enough for most people like me, who have a local repo + backup, only small projects, and want additional cloud hosting, just to feel secure.
It’s probably a not-so-good idea to rely on them if that code is your livelihood, though – you do want some level of contractual agreement there.
The next step up then would be either going with a hosted provider – there is a GitHosting list on GitWiki, or installing indefero on your own hosts. (The cost is roughly the same, since you will need a second hosting provider to gain any real benefit – it depends if you want somebody focused on source control systems only, or if you need a second hosting provider anyways)
And whatever you do – if it’s code that makes you money, make sure who you are going with. Losing source code is painful enough if it’s just a hobby project.
Hello, I am the main developer of InDefero. Just to inform you, a forge is considered inactive if nobody is accessing it for 6 months. It will be dropped only after a series of emails to warn the owner and of course, you have a daily backup with sql dump, subversion dump and zip of the uploads which will stay available even after the forge is dropped.
No mention of GitHub ? $7 a month for a half gig and 5 repos. If you mainly want backup, dump everything in one big repository.
Heh – github falls under the “hosted git” option
But you’re right – it is by far the market leader, so I really should’ve mentioned it. And I rather like it. In fact, it’s so good, I’ve thrown my hat in the ring for the github recommendation contest