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Deduplicating Binary Version Control with DupVer

I deal a lot with large-ish binary file in my work. Typically these

are single-file database in the style of Sqlite3. These aren't ideal

for putting in Git. Git doesn't scale well to large repository sizes.

People always seem to try framing this as not a limitation, but it is.

I've taken to using Boar, Restic and finally the Duplicacy

deduplicating backup software packages. I think at some point someone

had mentioned that it would be awesome to have something like Git but

that replaces the packfile format with deduplicating storage. And so I

got started scratching my own itch. You can find it on my GitHub here:

https://github.com/akbarnes/dupver

Dupver is a minimalist deduplicating version control system in Go

based on the Restic chunking library. It is most similar to the binary

version control system Boar:

https://bitbucket.org/mats_ekberg/boar/wiki/Home

Dupver does not track files, rather it stores snapshots more like a

backup program. Rather than traverse directories itself, Dupver uses

an (uncompressed) tar file as input. Not that only tar files are

accepted as input as Dupver relies on the tar container to provide the

list of files in the snapshot and store metadata such as file

modification times and permissions Dupver uses a centralized

repository to take advantage of deduplication between working

directories. This means that dupver working directories can also be

git repositories or subdirectories of git repositories. I mainly use

it for version control of databases, but it can also be used for

sampled data.

Art, 2020-10-24 07:41

Update 01/02/2021: Some Thoughts on the Future of Version Control

In response to a HN post, some thoughts about the future for version

control. Full discussion is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25535844

The state-of-the-art for backup is deduplicating software (Borg,

Restic, Duplicacy). Gripes about Git's UI choices aside, Git was

designed around human-readable text files and just doesn't do large

binary files well. Sure, there's Git-LFS, but it sucks. The future of

version control will:

Make use of deduplication to handle large binary files Natively

supports remotes via cloud storage Doesn't keep state in the working

directory so that projects can live in a Dropbox/OneDrive/iCloud

folder without corrupting the repo Is truly cross-platform with

minimal POSIX dependencies. I love Linux, but I'm a practicing

engineer, and the reality is that engineering software is a market

where traditional Windows desktop software still rules. Another

thought I've been having for some time is if I could have gotten away

with file level deduplication like Boar (or Git IIRC) does and drop

compression. This would probably result in significant simplification,

particularly for copying between repos. For most users this wouldn't

impact disk space usage much as the bulk of files already have

compression built in, and the trend seems to be increasingly to adopt

compression in new file formats. This includes:

Audio/Image/Video files with (usually) lossy compression. This

suprisingly (to me) also includes raster image editor file formats

such as Paint.net's pdn, which wraps everything in a gzip stream. MS

office documents structured as a hierarchy of zipped .xml files. More

recently, this format also includes Matlab's .slx Simulink file format

and .mlx notebook format. The gotcha to this is it's an 80% solution.

There are still plenty of file formats that are uncompressed text,

even newer ones such as JSON/YAML/TOML and a number of uncompressed

binary file formats such as MessagePack, though most tend to be some

sort of database such as the Geodatabase .gdb format which is based on

Sqlite3 or PowerWorld's .pwb format. There is also the corner case of

metadata in media files such as EXIF, which if modified would cause

the whole file contents to be stored again. So I'm sticking with

chunking for the time being.