github-backup is a simple tool you run in a git repository you cloned from Github. It backs up everything Github knows about the repository, including other forks, issues, comments, milestones, pull requests, and watchers.

Installation

git clone git://github.com/joeyh/github-backup cd github-backup make ./github-backup

Or use cabal:

cabal install github-backup --bindir=$HOME/bin

Why backup Github

There are a couple of reasons to want to back this stuff up:

• In case something happens to Github. More generally because keeping your data in the cloud and relying on the cloud to back it up is foolish.

• So you can keep working on your repository while on a plane, or on a remote beach or mountiaintop. Just like Linus intended.

What to expect

Each time you run github-backup, it will find any new forks of your project on github. It will add remotes to your repository for the forks, using names like github_linus_divemonitor. It will fetch from every fork.

Then the next pass will download metadata from each fork. This is stored into a branch named "github". Each fork gets a directory in there, like linus_divemonitor. Inside the directory there will be some files, like linus_divemonitor/watchers. There maybe be further directories, like for comments: linus_divemonitor/comments/1.

You can follow the commits to the github branch to see what information changed on github over time.

The format of the files in the github branch is currently Haskell serialized data types. This is plain text, and readable, if you squint.

Limitations

github-backup is repository-focused. It does not try to back up other information from Github. In particular, social network stuff, like users who are following you, is not backed up.

github-backup will find and backup all forks of a repository, and all forks of those forks, etc. However, it cannot go up the fork tree. So if your Github repositoriy is a fork of something else, the something else won't be backed up. There is an easy solution though. Just add the parent as a git remote. Then github-backup will find it, and back it up.

Currently, github-backup re-downloads all issues, comments, and so on each time it's run. This may be slow if your repo has a lot of them.

Author

github-backup was written by Joey Hess joey@kitenet.net

It is made possible thanks to:

• Mike Burns's haskell github library
• Github, for providing an API exposing this data.