I've struggled with this decision myself but I came to the opposite conclusion as you:

- Gitea's (I use Forgejo) reliance on disk storage for `.git` is perfect for me because files are well understood as a concept by most people. (To be clear, Gitea/Forgejo stores non `.git` artifacts in PostgreSQL.)

Every battle hardened linux tool knows how to backup files. Plain old `rsync` can backup and restore files. I have heard people put their `.git` on something like Dropbox and have tit work both for sync and backup (I've never tried it myself).

You can run checksums on files and ensure they are exactly how you expect them to be.

There are multiple, well tested, well understood options to reliably backup, snapshot and restore files.

Also, remote/cloud storage for files is really cheap. In most cases, if it's less than 10GB, you likely don't have to pay anything at all, as in $0 every month for having a backup on servers that won't go up in flames even if your laptop or house did.

- OTOH, PostgreSQL backup and restore feels like they are less popular or accessible to the general population vs files' backup and restore.

Infact, for non DBA folks who don't necessarily understand PostgreSQL WAL, backup snapshotting, what asynchronous and synchronous WAL replication means and how they affect RTO and RPO, there are definitely multiple and non-obvious ways to get more things wrong than right, and lose your data - something you wouldn't have to worry about when using files backup and restore.

> Whereas with this, I could just handle it as part of the database backup process

What's the database backup and restore process you follow right now and what are the tools you use?