Automatic versioning upon file change (modify/create/delete)

Question

I am looking for an implementation (on Linux) of a mechanism which would automatically and transparently version any changes in a directory (recursively). This is intended to be an addition (possibly replacement if all the requested features are available) to standard versioning (SVN, git, ...)

A product on MS Windows which does this is AutoVer (to have a better idea of the requirements). I would love to have something like that but aimed at Linux in a non-graphical environment.

I saw that there are some attempts to have this functionnality on Linux, the closest one I found is autoversionning on Subversion but it is not obvious to implement on existing environments (servers where, for instance, configuration files are local).

Maybe something working with inotify?

Thank you in advance for any pointers! WoJ

Answer 1

Immediatly ZFS comes to mind. It can create snapshots - and there are some projects to automatically create snapshots.

Answer 2

Such a script is not hard to write.

My favourite version control is git.

following script should do it:

#!/bin/sh
git add .
git commit -am "my automatic commit"

either have that periodically check your directory - or if your editor is scriptable call after you save.

But if you do it like this it might make sense to exclude large files and maybe some "useless" like autosaves.