Our life is in git now

Somewhere along the way, the way this household runs became a folder of documents: plans, research, reference files, the works — maintained by me and Claude together. Which raised an uncomfortable question: why is the most important folder in the house the one with no change history and no real backup story?

Programmers solved this decades ago with git — a system that tracks every version of every file, forever, and syncs it to a server. GitHub is the famous place to host that server. We wanted the same thing, except not on someone else’s computers — this data doesn’t belong in anyone’s cloud. So we run Forgejo, an open-source equivalent, on our own hardware. Our own private GitHub, at home.

The setup, briefly

It runs on one of the lab’s virtual machines, with sign-ups disabled and everything private. One deliberately boring choice: all its data lives in plain folders on a dedicated disk, so backing the whole thing up is a simple file copy — no archaeology required.

The three lessons

1. You can’t photocopy a book while someone’s writing in it. Our first backup script naively copied everything on a schedule — including the live database underneath the system, which produces a subtly corrupt copy if the database happens to be mid-write. The fix: ask the database to produce a clean, self-consistent export first, then copy files. Nightly snapshots run on that plan now; syncing them off-site is next.

2. Silent failures are the worst failures. Git handles big files (scans, PDFs) through an add-on, and if a computer has that add-on only half-configured, everything looks fine — except every big file arrives as a tiny placeholder instead of the real thing. No error, no warning, just bookmarks where your documents should be. We learned this the usual way. Every machine that touches the archive gets the add-on set up fully, first.

3. Keep the important stuff readable. Scanned documents went into the big-file system; the frequently-updated records stayed plain text on purpose — because a file whose changes you can read line by line is worth more than a slightly smaller archive.

The habit that makes it matter

The tooling only pays off because of a rule that came with it: every finished piece of work gets saved and synced the moment it lands. A plan drafted, an analysis finished, a decision recorded — commit it, push it, move on. Nothing lives uncommitted on one laptop overnight.

The unexpected benefit: the change history became a diary. Scrolling the log of the family workspace reads like a chronicle of what we actually did all year — which, come to think of it, is roughly what this blog is for.