Why SVN?

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

This is the last I'll speak on this topic. I promise...

% curl -s http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/CHANGES | egrep -ic
"dataloss|corrupt"
16

Including... SURPRISE! In the very latest release!!! and 5 in the last
year alone (since sept 2006 actually).

So does the storage type matter??? Hell no. Not with that track record.

Nothing is 100 percent free of data loss or corruption. Not Linux. Not
BSD. Not Windows. Not Solaris. And not *any* source code repository or
other application built upon them, free as in freedom, free as in beer
or expensive as all get out. This is why we RAID our disks and perform
frequent backups, live mirror if we need hot backup, and pay our
operations staff.

There are only two kinds of data in the world: those that have been
backed up and those that have not yet been lost.

 

[Charles Wise]

Including... SURPRISE! In the very latest release!!! and 5 in the

last year alone (since sept 2006 actually).

So does the storage type matter??? Hell no. Not with that track record.

As someone else said, every product has defects that can cause data
corruption, including Perforce
(http://public.perforce.com/public/perforce/faq/admin.html). They
wouldn't need recovery procedures for corrupted databases if they
couldn't get corrupted.

What matters is how reliably the product performs in the real world.
And that, barring some study proving it, is a personal opinion based on
your experience and what others say of their experience.

 

[Avdi Grimm]

backups. I simply can't say that about much of any other VCS out
there (except the nice stable old ones, like CVS).

Speaking as someone who was tasked with setting up and administering a
CVS server for a small team a couple years ago:

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. CVS stable? Trust CVS with your data? That's rich.

I'm not saying any other system is necessarily better; but treating
CVS as some kind of gold standard of reliability is hilarious. We're
talking about a system that can't even guarantee atomic commits. And
for which maintenance releases sometimes randomly break major features
and have to be manually patched. And which requires having a sysadmin
(or a knowledgeable user) around to periodically clean up orphan
lockfiles which break the repository.

The only thing CVS has going for it is that it is simple,
comparatively speaking. And often that's the most important
consideration. But it's only stable and reliable in comparison to
Visual Source Safe.

 

[John Joyce]

Believing that any information medium is infallable? Plain foolish.
Paper?
Magnetic tape?
Optical media?
Stone tablets?
Oil paint?

Software works on at least a few of these.
Software also operates under Murphy's law.
If you want a modicum of reliability, do like the military: multiple
redundancy!
That means use Raid Mirroring, on-site + off-site, use multiple systems?
Or best of all: don't be overly concerned about it. Accept the fact
that some versions saved will be corrupted and none will last
forever. Be realistic and plan for contingencies, but don't freak out
when they happen.