Version control-based backup with Git

People use different strategies for backing up data. Out of these, differential backups are more efficient than making copies of the entire source directory to a target of the backup directory with the version number using date or time of a day as it causes wastage of space. We only need to copy the changes that occurred to files from the second time that the backups occur - this is also called incremental backup. We can manually create incremental backups using tools like rsync but restoring this sort of backup can be difficult. The best way to maintain and restore changes is to use version control systems. They are very much used in software development and maintenance of code, since coding frequently undergoes changes. Git is the most famous and the most efficient version control system available. Let us use Git for the backup of regular files in a non-programming context.

Getting ready

We have a directory that contains several files and subdirectories...