My website has 214 hand written html, 1500 of pictures and a few, err sorry, 114
video files. All this takes around 1.5 GB of disk space at the moment.
Plain html files take 1.7 MB and fit naturally into git.

But what about the picture and video files?

Pictures are mostly static and rarely need to be edited after first upload, 
wasting a megabyte or two after an edit while having them in git doesn't really matter. 
Videos on the other hand are quite large from megabytes to hundreds. Sometimes
I re-encode them from the original source with better codec parameters and just
replace the files under html root so they are accessible from the same URL.
So having a way to delete a 200 MB file and upload a new one with same name and access URL
is what I need. And it appears git has trouble erasing commits from history, or requires
some serious gitfoo and good backups of the original repository.

So which ikiwiki backend could handle piles of large binary files? Or should I go for a separate
data/binary blob directory next to ikiwiki content?

Further complication is my intention to keep URL compatibility with old handwritten and ikiwiki
based site. Sigh, tough job but luckily just a hobby.

[-Mikko](http://mcfrisk.kapsi.fi)

ps. here's how to calculate space taken by html, picture and video files:

    ~/www$ unset sum; for size in $( for ext in htm html txt xml log; \
    do find . -iname "*$ext" -exec stat -c "%s" \{\} \; ; done | xargs ); \
    do sum=$(( $sum + $size )); done ; echo $sum
    1720696
    ~/www$ unset sum; for size in $( for ext in jpg gif jpeg png; \
    do find . -iname "*$ext" -exec stat -c "%s" \{\} \; ; done | xargs ); \
    do sum=$(( $sum + $size )); done ; echo $sum
    46032184
    ~/www$ unset sum; for size in $( for ext in avi dv mpeg mp4; \
    do find . -iname "*$ext" -exec stat -c "%s" \{\} \; ; done | xargs ); \
    do sum=$(( $sum + $size )); done ; echo $sum
    1351890888

> One approach is to use the [[plugins/underlay]] plugin to
> configure a separate underlay directory, and put the large
> files in there. Those files will then be copied to the generated
> wiki, but need not be kept in revision control. (Or could be 
> revision controlled in a separate repository -- perhaps one using
> a version control system that handles large files better than git;
> or perhaps one that you periodically blow away the old history to
> in order to save space.)
> 
> BTW, the `hardlink` setting is a good thing to enable if you
> have large files, as it saves both disk space and copying time. 
> --[[Joey]]

Can underlay plugin handle the case that source and destination directories
are the same? I'd rather have just one copy of these underlay files on the server.

> No, but enabling hardlinks accomplishes the same effect. --[[Joey]] 

And did I goof in the setup file since I got this:

    $ ikiwiki -setup blog.setup -rebuild --verbose
    Can't use string ("/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog/med") as an ARRAY ref while
    "strict refs" in use at 
    /home/users/mcfrisk/bin/share/perl/5.10.0/IkiWiki/Plugin/underlay.pm line 41.
    $ grep underlay blog.setup 
        add_plugins => [qw{goodstuff websetup comments blogspam html sidebar underlay}],
        underlaydir => '/home/users/mcfrisk/bin/share/ikiwiki/basewiki',
        # underlay plugin
        # extra underlay directories to add
        add_underlays => '/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog/media',
    $ egrep "(srcdir|destdir)" blog.setup 
        srcdir => '/home/users/mcfrisk/blog',
        destdir => '/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog',
        # allow symlinks in the path leading to the srcdir (potentially insecure)
        allow_symlinks_before_srcdir => 1,
        # directory in srcdir that contains directive descriptions

-Mikko

> The plugin seems to present a bad default value in the setup file.
> (Fixed in git.) A correct configuration would be:

        add_underlays => ['/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog/media'],
	
Umm, doesn't quite fix this yet:

    $ ikiwiki -setup blog.setup -v
    Can't use an undefined value as an ARRAY reference at /home/users/mcfrisk/bin/share/perl/5.10.0/IkiWiki
    /Plugin/underlay.pm line 44.
    $ grep underlay blog.setup 
        add_plugins => [qw{goodstuff websetup comments blogspam html sidebar underlay}],
        underlaydir => '/home/users/mcfrisk/bin/share/ikiwiki/basewiki',
        # underlay plugin
        # extra underlay directories to add
        add_underlays => ['/home/users/mcfrisk/www/blog/media'],
    $ ikiwiki --version
    ikiwiki version 3.20091032

-Mikko

> Yeah, I've fixed that in git, but you can work around it with this:
> --[[Joey]] 
        
	templatedirs => [],