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Comment by Remed | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity: why do you keep such documents in repositories instead of simply in a filesystem (on an encrypted volume, backed up and possibly synced across devices)? Tax spreadsheets usually don't change, so there's no need for version history (if anything, new rows for new years are added, but without changing past data).

I ask this because I'm trying to figure out a solution for myself for keeping sensitive personal information and I never thought about storing such documents in a repository. Maybe I am missing something and your use case will open my eyes. Thanks!

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For me one big benefit is that it's distributed. I like to keep my important documents backed up on all the computers i have, on a USB drive stored in a safe location and also store the data with a cloud provider.

Now, if i update one document on computer A, and another document using computer B, i have to sync it to all other devices which is a PITA without git. You get into the situation where you don't know if the version on the USB drive was newer or older than the one on computer B etc, whereas with git all this is available in the version tree and there are nice merge tools available.

I've been planning to do this even for photos, for all the reasons above, but haven't taken the full step yet.

Wouldn't encrypted files with a service like Dropbox help? Containers usually sync well (only syncs changed parts). Only downside is that you can't access files without decryption software.

Dropbox, as all other "just-works" sync services, don't handle merge conflicts very good. Suddenly you have thousands of Filename_EditedByX(3).txt in every folder and dont know which one of them is the newest and don't have their most common ancestor version easily available for a 3-way merge.

To be fair, they cannot handle merge conflicts with encrypted containers. I find that merge conflicts almost always cause more trouble than the work of avoiding them from the start. As long as you don't share data (with containers unlikely), merge conflicts should be extremely rare (and anticipated).

I am not OP but I do the same as him.

I used to keep the data on Dropbox but switched to a repo because it felt to have better safety against user error. It's not all that hard to accidentally delete or modify a file in a filesystem. Given the commit process it's much harder to do in a repo.

My tax sheets are updated throughout the year for various reasons (bonuses, side gigs, property sales, etc.), so I rely on the version history. I also keep a lot of other stuff that I update more rapidly (mostly in text documents.)

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