A Free and Secure Git Solution
You need a few things
First of all, the Git repo doesn't need to be on a second machine but I like to dedicate a machine in the house (that is always on) so that anyone can use it at anytime. This approach also centralizes the repo and makes things slightly more convenient to manage.
Next, sign up for a free account at Dropbox. (You should be able to substitute any cloud-based solution (Sugar Sync, Jungle Disk, …) or even a backup system like Crash Plan.)
Next step, follow the instructions on the TrueCrypt site to create a secure volume on the machine housing your Git repository. Be sure and create the file underlying this secure volume inside of a directory that gets replicated to the cloud solution you recently signed up for. This can be tricky to understand at first so beware, you are NOT backing up the secure volume at the mount point, instead, you want to backup the underlying file you created for the secure volume. You may want to size the secure volume a bit smaller than your cloud based quota - just to be sure you don't go over. As you will see below, I keep mine at about 2GB.
Now you'll need to install Git on that same machine, mount the TrueCrypt volume you just created and then prepare a Git repository inside of that secure volume. This isn't a Git tutorial so I won't go into much detail but I usually end up creating a directory with a .git extension, changing into that directory and initializing the repository with something like $ git init --bare
You will then need to enable SSH access to the Git repository. The machine housing the repository needs an SSH server to accept requests while the machines using the repository need an SSH client to connect to the server. This step requires different things for different platforms. I have had the easiest time doing this on my Mac and Linux boxes but it can be done just as well on Windows machines using something like Cygwin or Putty - it is just a bit more cumbersome.
That's it. My remote Git paths look something like imac:/var/github/ios/project.git. IPs and other types of paths should work just fine and don't be afraid to experiment and write in with what worked for you!
Note that in my case, Dropbox doesn't sync files that are in use. Consequently, it doesn't sync the the secure volume while it is mounted (since it is simply a big binary file). This means that I explicitly mount and unmount the volumes once a day or so. Also, since the secure volume looks like one huge binary file to Dropbox, it will try to sync the whole thing - consequently, I tend to keep my secure volumes small (2GB) and just create more as necessary. If you don't need the extra security that TrueCrypt affords, feel free to keep your repository directly in your cloud's backup directory space and it will get backed up according to your cloud's schedule (which could be as often as instantly).
