Restoring your backups

Folder structure

For an example of the folder structure SCM Backup creates, we’ll use the default config file that comes with SCM Backup. It looks like this (only the parts that are relevant here):

# all backups go here
localFolder: 'c:\scm-backup'

sources:

  - title:  github_singleuser
    hoster: github
    type: user
    name: scm-backup-testuser

  • Inside the localFolder, SCM Backup creates one subfolder for each source defined in the config, named like the source’s title

  • Inside that, it creates one subfolder for each repository

  • Inside that, it creates subfolders:

    • repo for the actual repository

    • wiki if the repository has a wiki

At the time of writing, the GitHub user “scm-backup-testuser” has two visible repositories (used for integration tests):

So SCM Backup would create this folder structure (C: is the main drive on Windows):

C:
└───scm-backup
    └───github_singleuser
        ├───scm-backup-testuser#scm-backup
        │   ├───repo
        │   └───wiki
        └───scm-backup-testuser#wiki-doesnt-exist
            └───repo

Note

The repo and wiki subfolders are the bare repositories that the next section refers to.

How to restore

Generally, SCM Backup creates local repositories and pulls from the remote repositories into the local ones.

Those local repositories are bare repositories, i.e. they don’t contain a working directory.

When you look inside the repository directories, you’ll see some directories and files, depending on whether it’s a Git/Mercurial/etc. repository.

Your complete history and your source code are in there - you just don’t see the actual files!

The repository is backed up without a working directory, because it’s not necessary.

All the data already exists inside the repository, a second copy of everything in the working directory would just be a waste of space.

The easiest way to restore your working directory is to clone the bare repository that SCM Backup created (called bare-repo in the examples), which will create a clone with a working directory (called working-repo in the examples).

For more details, please see the sub-page for the respective SCM: