Status:
Beta level. It works but perhaps shouldn't be considered stable.

Command line interface is version 1.02. It won't change in an incompatible way until interface version 2.0. Do not use this version if you have scripts constructed for a version with an interface version prior to 1.0.

Repository format is version 2.0. It won't change in an incompatible way until repository version 3.0. Do not use this version with repositories created/managed by a version with a repository version prior to 2.0.



Introduction:
"store" is a file storage and backup solution. Features include file and "prefix" level deduplication as well as compression.

Internally it has some resemblance to how git works, although with some differences:
- It's designed to store files, not code. No merging, forking, diffing, branching etc.
- Contrary to git it saves everything, including empty directories.
- Saves and restores all file, directory and symlink properties: owner, group, all 9 permission settings, modification time, access time, name and content. The only exception is modification/access time for symlinks which on many systems cannot be set in a decent way.
- Automatically applies file level deduplication and compression when storing things in a repository. Prefix deduplication, which deduplicates any common prefix across files (that is longer than a certain set size), is available on demand.
- Slower than git although optimization is on the todo list. As a backup or storage system, speed is not as high a priority as it would be for a productivity tool.



Installation:
No installation required. Copy store to a directory on your path or run it directly.



Usage:
For usage help, run store without parameters



Dependencies:
It's a shell script and depends on core utils and things present on most systems. A full list:
basename, bash, cat, chgrp, chmod, chown, date, dc, dd, diff, echo, grep, gunzip, gzip, ln, ls, mkdir, mv, readlink, rm, sed, sha1sum, sort, tee, tempfile, test, touch, uniq, whoami



Author/credits:
Written by "meingbg". Bugs, comments, suggestions etc: meingbg at gmail dot com
Thanks to "theCroc" and Peter Schuller for valuable suggestions and insights.