Can I use "Online Backup" to backup my DVS instead of pushing to an external repo?

I'm currently signed up with a third party service that hosts my mercurial repositories as a central hub to push my changes to as a sort of backup.

Now, I'm looking at a system to backup my laptop and am concidering Mozy. I'm a loan developer, and work on a laptop and am usualy connected to my internet via wifi with my lap开发者_开发技巧top only really being on when I'm working, so feel something like Mozy is my best option.

My question is, if I'm the only developer, could I get away with just using local mercurial repos and using Mozy to backup everything up? Rather than pushing to an external repo?

Many thanks

Matt

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Disclaimer: My experience is with git rather than hg, but as I understand it the concepts apply equally to both systems.

An advantage of backing up to a remote repo is that if your local repo becomes corrupted (perhaps due to a problem with the underlying filesystem), that corruption does not get transferred over to the backup, unless the files in your working tree themselves are corrupted.

For example, it's possible for some of the objects in the repository, perhaps those which are rarely accessed because you don't change them, to become corrupted. It could be months before you use one of those files again, and so months before you notice (though I think doing a garbage collect run, eg git gc, will detect corruption).

So if you are backing up by pushing commits, you're creating an independent version of those objects, and using checksums (ie the commit hash) to verify the transfer of any new files. Whereas if you are backing up to a backup provider, you're duplicating the actual objects in the repo, in whatever state they are in, and duplicating any changes to those files, including corruption of them.

Usually backup providers will give you rollback (spideroak seems to be particularly good for this) but you'll still have to sift through a lot of versions to figure out when the corruption happened; also with some providers, the rollback period is limited (especially for free accounts).