Git and Amazon S3

[Aneurin Price <aneurin.price@gmail.com>]

Hello all,

I have several (mostly private) git repositories which I'm using for various
purposes including versioned backup of moderate amounts of data, and I'm trying
to work out the cheapest way of having them remotely backed-up. Since I'm not
doing collaborative development, the git hosting options I've found aren't a
good fit - for this amount of data they tend to assume you must have a huge
project with many contributors, and charge accordingly.

It looks like the cheapest option from a pure storage and data-transfer point of
view would be S3, so I'm looking at the best way to use it with git. So far, the
options I've found are either using jgit, which I've never used but appears to
have a native S3 transport, or using one of the FUSE options to mount S3 as a
filesystem.

I'm not particularly happy about the idea of using jgit since it would require
java on all the machines I might want to use it with, and it would mean learning
to use a different command for fetch and push. It does have the bonus that it's
possible to publish repositories for read access via dumb http though. On the
other hand, I'm concerned about the fuse option because a) I'm not sure how
reliable it is, and b) I'm concerned that the abstraction might leak if, for
example, git assumes that it is accessing a local filesystem and acts
differently.

Does anyone have any remarks about these options? Is there a better option - how
difficult would it be to add native support to git? Are there any other options
for more git-friendly remote storage at a comparable price? Or maybe I should
just give up, spend more and get a Linode; then I'd have the flexibility to do
whatever I want with it.

Thanks for your time,
Aneurin Price