title: Git bare - what to backup?
body: <p>I'm sorry if this is covered elsewhere, but I can't find the answer.</p>
  
  <p>I have a bare repo, called bare.git which is the repository from which are cloned the dev repos. It all works well.</p>
  
  <p>I want to know where bare.git gets the source files from. Are they stored as binary files inside the bare.git file structure? I can move bare.git to another location and still clone repos out of it, so the source must, in some way, be portable. Or is it storing absolute network references to the files?</p>
  
  <p>There are three main reasons I want o know this information:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>We need to know what to backup.</li>
  <li>My boss wants to know where the source code has gone.</li>
  <li>We need a current composite version for testing.</li>
  </ol>