I discovered today that backups from the db come down with all indents removed. That makes them not really useful as backups, or as a way to bring down a local copy of the files, to do search and replace etc.

Advice from the eXist list pointed me at webdav, which I haven't used before. This is partially useful. You can mount the db like this:

sudo mount -t davfs "http://localhost:8080/mapoflondon/webdav/db" "/home/mholmes/WorkData/english/map_of_london/webdav"

This gives you a folder which is readable, but of course not writable because it was mounted as root. You could edit as root, or copy the files to another location and edit them there; then you could upload them into the db in the normal way.

All of this roundaboutitude is convincing me we really need to be using SVN for our data. I'll speak to JJ about this tomorrow.