[cvsnt] Repository Robustness

[Shawn Haigh]

Thank you for your prompt and very informative reply... I am planning on
using the standard client/server configuration, suppose that there was a
disk corruption or failure..? would I still be able to recover to the
last commit?  For example some other databases use a journal file
(usually on an other volume) to recover all the changes since the last
full backup of the database. Is there a similar feature with CVSNT if
not, would it be in the future?

- Shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Hoyle [mailto:tmh at nodomain.org] 
Sent: February 6, 2004 3:57 PM
To: cvsnt at cvsnt.org
Subject: Re: [cvsnt] Repository Robustness

Shawn Haigh wrote:
> I was just having a discussion with some colleagues about the scenario
> in which a repository would become corrupt. First of all, based on
> everyone's wide range of experience have you ever heard of this
> happening? Second, what would be the best way to keep a running backup
> of the repository.
> 
Assuming you're using a standard client/server configuration, it's 
pretty hard to corrupt a repository unless there's a corruption of the 
disk itself.  All file file level operations are atomic, so even if 
there's a power failure your repository will still be OK (you might have

a partial commit, but I don't consider that 'corrupt' as you can recover

it by doing an update/commit on the client).

Over file shares it's a lot more muddy - there have been reports of 
corruption using them, although rare.  I don't recommend that 
configuration for that reason (amongst others).

One scenario that could be called 'corrupt' is sharing sandboxes - 
checkout on an NT machine and checkin on a Unix machine.  You'll get the

CR/LF pairs stored in the RCS file and the next checkout on NT will 
convert that to CR/LF/LF, etc.  The rule of thumb is don't share 
sandboxes across platforms (but if you must, never mix clients).

Tony

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