Mercurial for Source Control (and backup) instead of Subversion

Question

Currently I'm using Subversion for keeping source changes centralized and also as a single point of backup. All users commit changes to the server and the server is backed up.

I'm wondering how something like Mercurial would work in a similar deployment? Since it's decentralized how do I get a solid backup for the entire system? I admittedly don't know anything about Mercurial, so I'm looking for some guidance on how its typically deployed? Do I misunderstand its use case?

I guess what I'm really after is how do I get a central copy for backup purposes if I convert to mercurial?

Answer 1

Mercurial is not decentralised, people can have a copy of the repository on their machines, but at some point they will need to upload their changes to the repository you have designated as the "main" one, otherwise how would you build the project or deploy a website?

You would still backup the main repository like you are doing with SVN, you just have to remind users that they need to upload their changes to the main repository regularly. This shouldn't be much of a problem if they used to use SVN as that was what they were doing before Mercurial.