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Version Control for MP3s?

Version Control for MP3s?

I've got a lot of "binary media", which I'll abstract away as "MP3s". I've also got several computers that I'd like to have the whole library on - a desktop, media box, a laptop here or there, etc. In short, it would be nice to be able to sync all these machines with each other such that they all have the same stack of files.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 257
Total answers/comments: 2
Guest [Entry]

"But your classic CVS/SVN system has
the obvious drawback of needing a full
repository to work, and I'd really
rather not have two copies of my 60gb+
MP3 folder sitting on a machine
somewhere, as well as not
traditionally dealing with binary
deltas very well.

With CVS/SVN you have one repository, and several working copies.
So the repository contains every file once plus the whole history for every file.
The working copy contains every file once plus some additional data per file (usually approx. the size of the file).

Very roughly:
Let's assume our revision control system cannot store diffs of binary files efficiently (not really true, but for simplicity). Your collection is 60 GB MP3 files.
If you have 10 revisions per file on average and we neglect compression (because MP3s compress bad) your repo will be ca. 600 GB and your working copy ca. 120 GB.

So, Distributed Version Control starts
sounding pretty good at this point.

In a distributed system every working copy is essentially a repository, that means
every working copy contains every file plus history.

Same assumptions as above, every copy will have ca. 600 GB.

Bottom line is, distributed system will require more space than centralized.

EDIT:

Even if your question is more about a large number of binary file than large binary files in version control the following post might be intersting: Revisiting large binary files issue."
Guest [Entry]

"The problem with trying to shoehorn version control systems into file synchronization systems is that you'll end up wasting a ton of disk space keeping all the old version history data in the repositories.

Personally for my large binary media collections, I don't care about being able to revert changes to any given file. All I care about is that the collection is synchronized between my systems. There are many file synchronization solutions out there, but they all have their various pros and cons. Some claim they're cross platform, but that only means Win/Mac. Others really are cross platform, but don't have large enough file size/quantity limits to be useful for large collections. Some offer web access to the files, but also suffer from the file size/quantity limitations. Any solution that keeps a copy of your files on a 3rd party server is inevitably going to cost you money if you have a large collection of files."