One repo - multiple sources possible?

Hello,

our work setup is that each of us has the full project locally on our workstations (filmmusic production here…). We often run into the problem that someone needs to pickup a file that was created by someone else and that person forgot to send the file after finishing work. No, we do not want any synchronization software running on our project folder - we have team members that create huge messes in their folders and it would mess up everyone elses folder as well.

My thought was that I could setup a restic server on my side and backup the project folders of all other workstations to that one restic repo. Not really as a backup but as a way of accessing files when everyone else is asleep (time zone difference coming into play here…) and can’t send missing files.

That way I (or any of the team members who are a little more technically skilled) could pickup files from the backup snapshots anytime I want.

I would have to open a restic server to the internet though from my location…

Is this feasible or am I overlooking major pitfalls? The deduplication should work for this use case as well, right?

I believe that you actually SHOULD use synchronization. Not to a common central directory, but to per-user directory on a central device. If you are afraid the this would require huge disk usage in that central device, use for example BTFS which has deduplicating built in.

That would have the added “benefit” (I like tinkering…) that I finally have a real argument to build a solid storage machine and familiarize myself with modern storage on Linux… something I’ve been holding off because of my desire to minimize power consumption and the raspberry pis are just not made to handle large storage and data throughput… tried that multiple times (with EXT4 file systems) but got unrecoverable drive corruption every time after a (short!) while… most likely due to the USB connection… I don’t know…

Hmmm… I was having so much fun using Restic that I thought that this could be a way of dealing with the challenge.

EDIT: sorry, I had tried BTRFS and ZFS not BTFS - just realized that…