How to backup only local changes of tree-less repo?

Push them all to your user namespace on launchpad.

Looking at the size of the .bzr dirs in the branches should demonstrate to you that just copying them won't help, the revisions are in the shared repository.

Thanks for the answer, but if I push them they would all become public viewable, right?

Wouldn't it be ideal if I backed up a notrees+stacked version of my repo. If I understand, no-trees means no data, stacked means no public metadata (it's fetched from online).

So how would I duplicate this repo, and convert the dup to a stacked one?

It's gcc, so I assumed we're talking free software rather that secret private things. If you're just concerned about people looking at your wip stuff and sneering, in practice no one cares. By all means mirror somewhere less accessible though.

You might want to review:

<http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/latest/en/user-guide/core_concepts.html>

So, 'no trees' specifically means not a copy of all the files on disk, and is unrelated to your commits and repository data. Working trees do not need backing up.

You probably don't want to use stacking, it's really tailored for specific launchpad uses and would make backups more fragile.

Having a copy of 1.3Gb doesn't seem too painful to me regardless. If you're worried about incremental backups, the repository pack files are actually reasonably stable, only repacking revisions on log10 intervals. So, the largest bit of the repository will remain unchanged across updates.

Unfortunately I'm not confident in making public all my junk branches. And since I'm backing up to remote location over a 50KB/s DSL uplink it will take long, but I guess I'll wait the first time and then do only incremental. Ofcourse all new changes from lp:gcc from when pulling, are too many and will slow down incremental backups too. That's why I was looking for the optimal solution. Thanks for the tips though!