backgitup

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I need to backup my git repositories? Doesn’t every developer have a back up on their machine?

In the world of software development, the safety and integrity of your code are paramount. While it’s true that each developer might have a local copy of a git repository, relying solely on this for backup purposes is a risky proposition. Here’s why backing up your git repositories is not just a good practice but a necessity.

Disaster Recovery: Safeguard Against the Unexpected

Service failures and malicious attacks are real threats in today’s digital landscape. Whether it’s a cloud service outage or a targeted intrusion by cybercriminals, your project’s progress can be severely impacted, if not entirely lost, without a robust backup solution. Regular, automated backups ensure that you can quickly recover your entire project to its last known good state, minimizing downtime and protecting your work from unexpected disasters.

Compliance and Peace of Mind

For many organizations, compliance with industry regulations requires strict data protection strategies, including code. Backups are a critical component of meeting these standards, offering not just security but also peace of mind that you’re in line with legal and industry requirements. Whether it’s GDPR, HIPAA, or any other regulation, having secure, accessible backups can be the difference between compliance and costly penalties.

Collaborative Workflows and Historical Integrity

In a collaborative environment, code changes frequently and rapidly. While each developer may have a copy of the repository, these are continuously updated, potentially overwriting valuable history or making it difficult to roll back to a specific version. Automated backups serve as a timestamped archive, preserving every version of your project. This historical integrity is crucial not just for tracing changes but also for understanding the evolution of your codebase over time.

Protecting Against Local Failures

Relying on local copies as backups overlooks a simple but critical risk: local hardware failure. Hard drives crash, laptops are lost or stolen, and without an external backup, your repository goes with them. External backups, especially those stored offsite or in the cloud, safeguard against personal device failures, ensuring your code is secure no matter what happens to your hardware.

Ensuring Business Continuity

For businesses, code is not just a project; it’s an asset. Business continuity plans often hinge on the ability to maintain operations under adverse conditions, which includes preserving and accessing your intellectual property—your code. By backing up your git repositories, you ensure that your business can withstand technical mishaps, data corruption, or cyber-attacks without losing its valuable assets.

In essence, while local copies of git repositories provide a layer of redundancy, they fall short of offering the comprehensive protection that dedicated backups provide. From disaster recovery and compliance to historical integrity and business continuity, the reasons to back up your git repositories are compelling. In today’s fast-paced and often unpredictable tech landscape, being prepared with regular, secure backups isn’t just a best practice—it’s a necessity.

How do I backup up my git repositories?

You’ve got a few options to take a back up of a git repositories:

To take a full backup and get everything from your remote down to your local machine then you can use git clone --mirror.

To create an archive of the repository use git bundle --all.

What security processes are in place?

• Authentication to your account is done via your service provider such as Bitbucket. Keep your Bitbucket account safe and your account with us will stay safe too.
• Our access to your service provider can be revoked at any time by removing our app from your service provider account.
• We only require read-only access to your service provider. We provide instructions on how to restore a backup but don’t do this automatically for you which is an architectural decision on our part. We don’t want write access to your account and would prefer to trade off ease of use for security in a restoration scenario.
• We use Amazon S3 to store your backups with server-side encryption enabled on all buckets. We also encrypt the backups ourselves before uploading to S3 with a key unique to each snapshot. If our AWS account were ever compromised, the attacker would still not be able to read your backups.