This is the spiffy homepage for the vcs-home group. We try to figure out how to use version control systems to manage your documents. This includes topics such as backups and anything else related you might think of.

We are mostly a mailing list for now. Please join and post your thoughts. There is also #vcs-home/irc.oftc.net if you want to chat.

And this is a wiki, meaning you can/should/are allowed to edit it!

Links

Conceptual stuff:

• Article on how Joey Hess uses (used) Subversion to maintain his home directory

Approaches:

• madduck's script is deprecated in favour of RichiH's vcsh. If you are interested in the underlying technique, read this, that, and the other.
• Penny explains her multi-repository setup.
• Steve Kemp hacked up a dotfile manager.
• Mike O'Connor took madduck's approach a bit further: his movein script
• Richard "RichiH" Hartmann's vcsh is a fully-fledged suite to manage everything about your configs. It fully integrates with mr allowing you to be really lazy.
• dvcs-autosync is a "A personal Dropbox replacement based on Git" which can conveniently autocommit/sync one or more vcs directories
• dotsync can pull from a git repo, and "push" to any number of remote machines with git or rsync to keep your dotfiles in sync across machines
• dotphiles is a forkable dotfile repo, using dotsync, dotzsh & dotvim
• Adam Spiers uses mr together with a plugin for GNU Stow (a symlink farm manager). This approach is in some respects similar to vcsh but uses symlinks rather than detached git working trees.

Tools:

• Manpage of the git-home-history tool
• Article about gibak, a Git-based backup system (see also Debian RFP)
• mr, a tool to manage a collection of repositories
• etckeeper, a Git-based approach to maintaining /etc
• Article comparing SVN, Mercurial and Git for home directory management
• flashbake, a Git-based tool for seamless, continuous versioning of projects
• git-annex allows versioning large files with git, without the pain of checking their contents into git
• caretaker, a powerful package manager for configuration files and the like
• homesick, a Ruby gem which allows symlinking of dotfiles from git repo into $HOME (c.f. approach above based on GNU Stow)