DevSecOps and data protection have become a necessity in our today’s reality. Outages, accidental or intentional deletion, human errors, cyber-attacks, and constant detection of new vuls are among those triggers that can work on companies to search for a reliable security strategy… and backup is one of the key elements in building such a strategy. Don’t you agree that when it comes to the source code and the security of GitHub repositories and metadata, the issue takes on a whole new meaning?
Why back up GitHub?
Being a leading version control hosting platform the developers opt for, GitHub has a recording number of over 1M registered users and it has become a DevOps hub that shapes the future of software. About 150K companies have chosen GitHub as the first resort destination for their sensitive data. But is it so secure to solely rely on a git service provider? Increasing ransomware and malware attacks, data breaches, service outages, your own infrastructure downtime, human mistakes, and accidental deletions – they all lead to data loss.
Here you shouldn’t forget that GitHub, as any other SaaS provider operates within the Shared Responsibility Model under which GitHub and a user share responsibilities on such aspects as infrastructure, storage, compliance, retention, and restore.
What about backup? Well, GitHub provides basic backup plans, so to say, snapshots, but it is just the state of the system at some definite time, so if an outage happens GitHub will be able to restore its operation. But what about your GitHub data backup? It’s you who need to hold the fort here.
Possible methods to back up GitHub: can we consider them as a reliable backup solution?
Before we fire up with different backup tools, let’s look at the alternatives that DevOps may mention mistakenly thinking that they can substitute a backup:
Is Git a backup itself?
Well, it is a myth… yes, Git can help you revert the changes as it does have a version history for your source code and project files. However, Git is primarily designed to track changes in text-based files. So, when it comes to large binary files or databases, Git isn’t suitable as it’s not a backup tool.
Moreover, Git focuses on tracking changes within a single repository. What if you have to back up multiple repositories with complex dependencies or your entire GitHub ecosystem? In this case, Git may not be sufficient at all, as it’s not a backup tool.
Can Git Clone serve as a backup?
You may have heard that Git Clone can substitute backup, yet it’s another myth. Well, git clone is a useful command for creating local copies of repositories, however, it’s hard to call it a comprehensive backup solution.
First, the “git clone” command fetches only the current state of the repo without historical versions, branches, or tags, and it doesn’t include metadata (issues, wikis, pull requests, or any other project settings crucial for the developing process). Moreover, when you create a git clone, you get a snapshot of your repository’s state at a specific point in time, so if your data is corrupted, you won’t be able to recover it to a specific historical state having only a clone.
What about the git branch? Can it substitute a backup?
Another option that can mislead is the git branch. Again… it can’t substitute for a proper backup solution. This “git branch” command is essential for managing different lines of development within a repository, however, it can’t help to protect data and restore your source code should the event of a disaster take place.
Moreover, like the “git clone” command, “git branch” command focuses on code and its history and it doesn’t capture such valuable data as issues, pull requests, settings, or wiki content.
What about the “Download zip” option?
Another way you can choose is to download your GitHub repository as a compressed zip file. It will contain all your files (except commit messages and timestamps) and folders in the current state, which is good as you can access it at any time once you download the file to your local machine.
However, there are downsides, as downloading zip files rests on the user, who can forget to download the file or make a mistake. Moreover, such zip files don’t retain the revision history of the repo, so you may have difficulties tracking the changes or accessing previous versions.
So, if you still want to give this backup option a try, you can follow two different paths:
- download a repository Zip: You need to go to the repo, and at the top under the “Code” tab, select “Download Zip” at the bottom when the “Code” drop down.
- download Gist Zip: You should select “Download Zip” in the top right corner of the page on your Gist. That’s it! You can download your zip file.
The backup script, is it a backup strategy?
You can opt for a GitHub backup script, it may be your own backup scripts or you may find one in the GitHub Community – whatever you want. Backup scripts still have their pros and cons.
Well, from the positive side using a backup script gives you a copy of your GitHub data. And, probably, it’s what you want. But, shouldn’t you ensure that your GitHub backup is relevant? Or, another question: Are you sure that you will be able to quickly recover your data at any moment of your request?
That’s a fly in the ointment. If you take a backup script from the Community or elsewhere, you can never be sure that it’s secure and it will definitely protect your critical data. Somebody or even you can make mistakes in the code and your backup file can become useless, as it will be impossible to restore. Moreover, to recover your GitHub data you will need to write a recovery script, which takes time and provides no guarantee of your valuable GitHub data recovery. And, what brings more frustration, all those processes are manual, you are the one who needs to track backups, check if they are recoverable copies, update and keep them for the proper period of time, etc. All the responsibilities are on you.
How to pick up the right GitHub backup third-party tool?
So, the moment of truth… What features your GitHub backup solution should have, so that it guarantees your critical GitHub data is recoverable?
Well, you should take a look at all the features in a bundle as they need to meet your requirements and needs and take GitHub backup best practices as the foundation. Hovewer, those features may vary depending on the niche you work in, or the RTO and RPO you have, the proper evaluation should go within 4 main categories – backup performance, ransomware protection, Disaster Recovery option, and monitoring of backup performance. So, let’s look at these categories from top to bottom.
Backup performance: is it enough to have only automated backups?
Once you have automatic daily GitHub backups, it greatly reduces the responsibility of your team and eliminates human mistakes. So, your team can concentrate on their main duties. But, you need much more than only automated backups. It’s crucial that you have the possibility to schedule your backups at the most suitable time for you, for example during out-of-work hours to minimize bandwidth throttling, or to meet strict RTO, and RPO, for example, having backups every 30 minutes or more frequently. So, your backup solution shouldn’t limit you to one copy per day.
Among the other important aspects of backup performance, it’s worth mentioning:
- the ability to back up GitHub repos and their metadata, as your wikis, issues, pull requests, etc. may contain important information that makes your DevOps work smooth.
- long-term or unlimited retention, as sometimes you need to keep your backup copies for 5 years or even longer. So, your GitHub backup tool shouldn’t limit you to a month or a year of retention.
- storage compatibility, as it will permit you to pick up the place to store your data of your choice without being limited to one storage. Also, it’s important to have the possibility to keep your data both in the cloud or on-site, so you should always check what storage options are available among those your backup provider offers.
- the possibility of assigning multiple storage locations, as it will help you follow the golden backup strategy, the 3-2-1 backup rule, that assumes to have at least 3 copies in 2 storage destinations, one of which is offsite and guarantees your critical data recoverability and availability. Moreover, if you have the possibility to assign multiple storage locations, you can upgrade your backup strategy to the 4-3-2 or the 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategies that are gaining popularity these days.
Ransomware protection as part of a reliable backup tool
We can’t deny the fact – backup is a final line of protection. That’s why it’s important to check what security measures your backup tool provides. For sure, it should:
- provide AES-256 encryption at rest and in flight, as it will help to secure your critical data during the backup process. Also, it’s nice if your backup provider permits you to set up your own encryption key because, in this situation, you will be the only one who knows it.
- store your backup copies in an immutable storage, as in this case if your storage destination is hit by ransomware, it won’t spread in it.
- limit access to storage credentials, as it will help to prevent attackers from gaining access to your storage.
Another important beeping indicator of a secure and reliable backup solution is compliance with strict international certifications. So, it’s worth checking what security audits your backup app has already passed. Among the most trustworthy security audits, we can mention GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type I, and SOC 2 Type II, as it means the backup provider guarantees the security, availability, confidentiality, privacy, and processing integrity of your DevOps data.
Disaster Recovery features for instant access
You never know when a disaster can happen, so it’s important to be ready for it at any time. The assurance that you can instantly access your GitHub data and recover it in a few clicks permits you to eliminate downtime, guarantee continuous workflow, and have peace of mind. So, it’s nice when a backup provider gives you a few recovery options and can tell you what to do in any disaster scenario. Thus, for sure your GitHub backup tool should permit you:
- point-in-time restore so that you can recover your data from a very specific point in time in the past.
- granular recovery to quickly restore only the data necessary for your continuous workflow.
- restore to the same or new GitHub account, for instant access to your data.
- cross-over recovery to restore your DevOps data quickly to another git hosting platform.
Exploring GitHub Backup Applications: a thorough analysis
The analysis of GitHub backup apps shows how crucial these solutions are for maintaining data integrity and disaster recovery inside your GitHub infrastructure. These tools provide a wide range of functions, including automated scheduled backups and on-demand project data snapshots, that can help you reduce the chances of data loss or any other system failure.
Moreover, this review assists GitHub users with information about the effectiveness, dependability, and ease of use of the mentioned GitHub backup applications available in the market. Thus, they will be able to make a wise decision on how to protect their GitHub critical data.
GitProtect.io
GitProtect.io is a cloud-based automated GitHub backup software that offers the most cutting-edge backup features. With the solution, you can back up your GitHub and/or GitHub Enterprise (including repositories and all the related metadata). Moreover, the backup solution also protects Jira Software, Jira Work Management, and Jira Service Management, which can help you build complete protection of your DevOps environment. The backup provider also supports GitLab and Bitbucket backups, which makes it possible to migrate your stack from GitHub to another Git hosting provider should the need arise.
What are the key benefits of GitProtect.io? Let’s look at the example:
Easy setup and usability: You don’t need to install any software or agents to start backing up your GitHub repos and all the related metadata, including LFS. It’s easy to manage your backups from anywhere (you can access the platform from any browser) as the backup software has a user-friendly interface and provides powerful dashboards, visual statistics, on-demand actions, advanced audit logs, Slack notifications, and real-time logs for instant monitoring.
Automated backups: Once scheduled, your backups are run automatically at any frequency and extant time you need to keep up with your requirements, or, for example, to reduce bandwidth throttling. The backup solution is built within the Plug&Play approach which means that all you need to do is to confirm the operation and all the backup jobs will be performed automatically. Of course, if there is a need you can always create backups on demand, as well. You can use GitProtect.io’s predefined plan to test the solution or customize your own backup plan or plans for different repositories and metadata. Moreover, you are able to set multiple backup policies if your organization has a complex infrastructure, customizing retention settings and encryption levels.
Multi-storage system: With GitProtect.io, you can easily meet the 3-2-1 backup rule (or any other modern tendencies – the 4-3-2 or 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule), as the solution permits simultaneously sending backups to different storage instances of your choice. You can pick up GitProtect Cloud Storage, which is included in the backup plan for free, opt for your local storage (SMB network shares, NAS devices, or local disk resources), or bring your own (AWS, Azure Blob Storage, Wasabi, Backblaze, Google Cloud Storage, or any other compatible with S3).
Secure backups, ransomware protection, and compliance: GitProtect.io allows backup of your entire GitHub environment – all your critical GitHub repos and metadata, including wikis, issues, issue comments, pull requests, deployment keys, webhooks, pull requests, pull request comments, milestones, labels, pipelines/actions, LFS, collaboration, tags, releases, commits, projects, and branches. The backup vendor provides AES-256 encryption in flight and at rest with the possibility to set your own encryption key. Moreover, to strengthen security, all your backups are sent to WORM-compliant storage (if you choose GitProtect Cloud Storage) and all the files are kept separately, which means that if ransomware hits your storage it won’t be able to spread inside and infect the rest of your data. You always know how the backup job is done thanks to advanced monitoring options, alerting, and reporting. Thus, the solution can help you comply with numerous security regulations and compliance requirements, including HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001.
Comprehensive restore options and instant Disaster Recovery: Clearly understanding what dangers your GitHub critical data can face (GitHub outages, your infrastructure downtime, unintentional or intentional deletion, ransomware attack), GitPtotect.io developed mechanisms to foresee any possible data loss scenario. With the backup solution, you can quickly and easily recover your data by using point-in-time restore, granular recovery, restore to the same or a new GitHub account, restore to your local device, or cross-over recovery to another git hosting service (i.e. from GitHub to Bitbucket or GitLab).
It’s possible to try the solution for free during a 14-day trial, which is a perfect way to try and test the backup software… It’s always better to see once than try many times, isn’t it? If you go to GitHub Marketplace, you can install the solution for free for up to 15 repositories. If you have a more complex GitHub infrastructure, the billing heavily depends on the number of repos you want to protect.
Rewind Backups
Being an on-demand backup and restoration tool for DevOps, Rewind (formerly BackHub) helps businesses back up and restore GitHub data quickly when an error or another failure occurs.
Here are some of the advanced features that Rewind can boast of to guarantee its customers’ quick access to their data in case of a disaster:
- Automated daily backups: With the solution you can create a GitHub backup plan for your repositories and metadata, and run it automatically without slowing down your DevOps workflow.
- Unlimited storage: You can store your GitHub data in Rewind’s cloud storage location, which is unlimited and AES-256 encryption secured.
- Sync backups: You can synchronize your backup storage with an additional one for an extra layer of security.
- 365-day data retention: You can keep your backed-up data for up to 365 days with no limits.
- Fast recovery: You can instantly restore your backup snapshot on your GitHub account without affecting your existing code.
When it comes to the pricing, rewind Backups for GitHub is billed depending on the number of GitHub Organization Members you have. The pricing starts at $ 14/month and includes up to 3 GitHub organization members. If your organization has more users, you will need to pay an extra $ 4/ month per additional one. It’s possible to try the solution for free during the 14-day trial period.
Cloudback Backup
Providing a cloud backup solution for GitHub repositories, Cloudback ensures that all GitHub repos and repository-associated metadata are accurately backed up on a daily basis within the preferred schedule.
To secure its users’ GitHub data, Cloudback has the following backup features:
- Automated scheduled backups: You can easily schedule daily backups of your GitHub repositories and their metadata to different storage locations (it supports Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Cloud, Wasabi, Alibaba Cloud, and OpenStack Swift.
- Retention: Setting up a backup plan by default you get a 30-day retention plan, however, if you need more, you can choose between 90, 180, or 360 days of retention (in case it’s not enough for your organization’s requirements you can contact the backup provider).
- Download backups: You can manually download your backups to your PC if you need to keep them locally.
- Restore to GitHub: You can manually restore your backup to a new GitHub repository, however, you may need to install an additional app Cloudback Restore for a short time (during the process of restoration) as the Cloudback app has read-only access.
- Deduplication: You can enable data deduplication to save your cloud storage space and reduce operational costs.
- Notifications: The backup provider allows notifications on your email or such collaboration apps, like Slack, MS Teams, or Discord.
The pricing for monthly plans starts at $ 10/month per 10 repos and goes up to $ 500/month per 1000 repositories. However, it’s possible to try the solution for free, as Cloudback provides a free plan for one repository only.
BackupLABS
Protecting GitHub repositories, Gists, and metadata from accidental deletion, ransomware, and nefarious users, BackupLabs allows rapid setup of automated backups for the GitHub ecosystem.
Among the advantages of integrating BackupLABS with GitHub, it’s possible to mention:
- Easy setup: You can easily authorize access and initiate GitHub backups without any manual configuration.
- Automated GitHub backups: You can choose what GitHub data to protect and it will be automatically backed up every 24 hours.
- Restoration process: You can granularly restore only the data you need to your GitHub account easily rolling back to a specific date.
- Backup visibility: You can easily track what data is backed up, or if there are any possible errors during the backup process on the dashboard.
- Encryption: Your backups are encrypted during the transfer and at rest with 256-bit encryption.
- Zip file support: You can manually download and save your backups as a zip file locally to your PC.
It’s possible to try the solution for free for a fortnight. After the trial is over, you will need to pay $ 4/month per 10 GitHub projects, or more depending on the size of your infrastructure.
Backrightup
Having offices in different parts of the world – the US, Europe, and Australia, Backrightup brings peace of mind with its automatic DevOps backups.
In building a reliable GitHut data protection, the backup vendor provides the following key features:
- 1-click setup: You can quickly set up your automated backup plan for GitHub repositories and metadata.
- Restoring data: You can granularly restore your repository or selected metadata from any point in time to continue coding without interruption.
- Encryption: You can get your data encrypted with the AES 256 encryption at transit and at rest.
- Automation: All your new repositories and metadata are automatically added to your once-created backup plan.
- Storage: You can use Azure/AWS storage or bring your own.
If you have up to 15 repositories, you can back up them for free. The price starts from $ 19 /month for 16 repositories and grows depending on the number of repositories you need to back up.
SimpleBackups
Being a platform that allows automatic backups of GitHub repositories, issues, accounts, and wikis, SimpleBckups also permits you to choose where to keep your data – server, or third-party platforms like S3 or SFTP drive.
Taking care of its customers’ GitHub data security, the backup provider has developed the following key features:
- Automatic backups: You can connect your GitHub account and easily set up automatic daily backups that include repos, issues, pull requests, wikis, actions, etc.
- No-code backups: You can back up your data without the necessity to maintain any GitHub API or script.
- Storage: You can bring your own storage as the backup tool is integrated with various storage locations, including AWS, DigitalOcean, Google Drive, Wasabi, Alibaba, Exoscale, and others.
- Security: The backup service provides different security measures to protect your GitHub data, including team and user authorization, encryption, SSL and self-hosted keys, and Multi-factor authentication.
The backup vendor has 3 billing packages – Essential, Standard, and Advanced. The Essential one starts from $ 49/month for 20 backup jobs with up to 12-hour backup intervals. Also, the backup provider gives a possibility to try its solution for free during a 7-day period.
SnapShooter
Allowing independent code backups, SnapShooter is a service that permits uploading its users’ GitHub repos to S3 without any worries about custom scripts falling.
Here are the key characteristics of the backup solution:
- Any-time backups: You can set the backup of your public or private GitHub repositories from daily to every hour.
- Server-based GitHub backups: If you want your data to stay within your network, you can connect the backup service to your server through SSH for automatic backups.
- Serverless GitHub backups: You can easily comply with your regional regulations as the backup vendor has many servers in various parts of the world.
The solution has a free version for 1 team member who can perform only 1 backup job per day. Paid packages start from $ 13/month for 3 backup jobs per day for 1 team member.
Takeaway
What is the best way to back up your critical GitHub data? The answer depends on your requirements and goals you have, so why not ask yourself:
- what issues do I need to resolve?
- what are our internal security policy requirements?
- what budget do I have?
- what size of organization do I need to protect?
- how critical is the data I have in my GitHub repositories?
And the list of these questions we can easily continue. To understand what you really need and which backup option or backup software better meets your requirements, it’s worth testing all the mentioned GitHub backup tools in this extensive analysis. Check all the features: backup performance, scheduler, DR possibilities, ransomware protection, reporting and alerting, security measures, SAML integration, etc. Make sure that your choice has your back(up)!