GitHub shuts down? What then?

GitHub and Bitbucket are the most popular hosting services used by Git users nowadays. Of course, it is possible to configure everything in Git exactly as we want but it is not a coincidence that people use such ready-made services. GitHub and Bitbucket are distinguished by availability, security, and scalability. But…can we take it for granted?

Risks and attacks

Let us surprise you. Did you know that one of these hosting services has been attacked on average once every six months in recent years? It may not have been a huge scale, but people have lost access to their repositories and the source code they’ve been working on for months! Or there were situations when no one could synchronize their work with an external repository for long hours. Why? Because, for example, Gitlab had a serious failure or GitHub was down. We can enumerate many situations that could be beyond our control but instead, let’s focus on how you can protect your source code and business continuity against such failures. 

Security methods

Like every kind of electronic data, your source code hosted within GitHub or Bitbucket should be protected with appropriate backup software. In theory, because unfortunately, reality seems a bit different. Some people believe that hosting the code within hosting services like GitHub or Bitbucket is a repository backup itself. How many would be surprised to discover that even GitHub in its documentation recommends having an additional third-party backup of GitHub repositories and metadata.

So how should you backup your repositories? What options do you have? There is such a thing as GitHub Enterprise Server Backup Utilities. However, we need to install it on a separate host to perform regular backups. It’s fine, but still, you are tied to one platform, in both repository hosting and backup cases. 

Why should you have a separate GitHub backup?

First of all – to not rely on one platform. So, what now? We can write our own scripts, but it is time-consuming, with very high long-term costs. Maintaining your own tools and storage takes a lot of work and costs. Just like with Git and GitHub – there are many reasons to use external, ready-made solutions. It’s more reliable, cheaper, faster, and more effective to use third-party software like Git repository backup GitProtect.io. It provides us with encryption, long-term retention (even repository archive), versioning, GFS scheme, compression, many recovery options (even migration), and more. And it is accessible through the web, with a simple graphical interface so it is easy to use and more convenient than scripts. But you don’t even have to log in daily – set your backup plan once and then just stay up to date with email and Slack notifications. 

So what would you do if GitHub shut down today? By using the right backup tools, your business would be safe and going. You wouldn’t lose any data and you could easily restore our repositories and continue working.

You can check for backup solutions dedicated to GitHub, like GitProtect.io, on GitHub Marketplace or even benefit from the free offer.  

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