How to back up private branches in git

Question

I have a local branch for day-to-day dev work in git. My workflow is:

1. Do stuff on local_branch, commit
2. Fetch origin/master
3. Rebase local_branch to catch up with new stuff from origin/master

It all works fine, however most of the recommendations I encountered say that one should not "push" private branches, on which rebase is regularly performed.

The problem here is that in this case local branch is not backed up to a server and the only way to save the work is to merge it back to "pushable" branch (i.e. origin/master)

What would be your recommendations on the workflow in this case?

Thanks!

UPDATE: I realised that one of the original requirements I had (avoiding usage of external utilities) is unnecessary limiting.

My current solution is to store all my repositories in a cloud-synchronised folder - this way I get backup for free.

Answer 1

I use the --mirror option and push to a personal backup repository:

Add it as a remote:

git remote add bak server:/path/to/backup/repo 

Do the backup:

git push --mirror bak 

This will automatically make your backup repository look like your active one -- branches will be created, deleted, updated (even forced/non-fastforwards) as needed. You can make an alias for this too:

git config alias.bak "push --mirror bak" 

Then, it's just a matter of running "git bak" when you want to do a backup. You could also throw this into a cron job.

Answer 2

There's nothing wrong with pushing personal branches. It is generally discouraged because people might start work based on your branch, and when you rebase, their changes are left floating.

What I do is use a prefix to denote "this is my branch, use it on your own risk", like: fc-general-cleanup.