Simple question - is it safe to backup a local-only Git repository with no other collaborators by zipping the project folder containing the .git folder? I've read other questions saying zipping the folder is not atomic if somebody edits the repository in the middle of the backup however I'm just wondering if you have a git repository that only you are working on if then it is safe to zip the project folder to back it up. Thanks.

CodePudding user response：

as long as you work alone and do not modify the folder while zipping it is safe.

CodePudding user response：

if somebody edits the repository in the middle of the backup

While this is a caveat to be aware of, for a "local only" repo, you should be the only user that has access to do anything to the repo. So there shouldn't be any issues.

CodePudding user response：

If the repository is idle (that is, there are no processes, including editor or background git gc processes running inside it), then this is safe. If you are on Unix, it's generally better to use a tar file instead of a zip file because it's more likely to preserve permissions and because you don't generally want to compress the archive (since all the data in .git is compressed).

There are two things to be aware of:

• First, if you restore this, git status or any other process reading the repository will have to re-process the entire working tree because the metadata stored in the index will have changed.
• Second, it is not safe to share a working tree between users, since anyone who can modify the repository configuration can cause arbitrary code to be executed. Thus, you should only restore backups like this you've created yourself and not ones created by others.