[clug] database backups with git

[Robert Edwards]

I have been playing with keeping daily text dumps of my database in
git, in lieu of rotating or date-stamping them. I haven't seen many
references on the web about people doing this. Is it a good idea or
no?

For example, daily PostgreSQL database dumps of a mediawiki site over
a 3 month period get up over 500MB, but in git, that is reduced to
around 160MB. Then I can rsync the git repository of the backup file
to another server a bit faster (most of the hashes are the same, only
the new ones get to go over the wire).

Anyone else use a VCS for maintaining snapshots of backup files/logs?

What is the downside?

Cheers,

Bob Edwards.