GitHub As A Backup. Can We Treat It This Way?

Does your company use Git? Well, so probably also GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab as a convenient, practical and secure way to host repositories. Let’s use GitHub as an example here. It provides users not only with hosting. It’s a great service when it comes to authorization or integration with various different services (including those available within GitHub Marketplace).

Is My Data Safe In GitHub?  

In short - yes! GitHub provides its users with many security measures and we consider it a safe place. But please, keep in mind that even the most protected services might put our data in danger - there is never a 100% guarantee. That’s why you need to make some diversification and have reliable third-party backup software. But we will get back to this…

Let’s discuss the basics when it comes to GitHub security in the first place. When you start using GitHub you need to create an account. The service recommends using a strong, abstract password and changing it on a regular basis. Great practice is to set a special authorization token assigned to the account that will keep you ensured that only accounts with the appropriate token are able to access your repos. Finally, you can use an SSH connection so it’s encrypted and no one is able to intercept the communication.

GitHub vs. Backup - Basic Differences 

We must admit that GitHub takes care of data accessibility and availability. But can we really treat GitHub as a backup? No, never!. We cannot treat 'pure' Git as a backup because it is just a tool. Same as GitHub. Let’s find out what are the most crucial features a backup software should have:

-      Automation - backup jobs should perform according to some defined plan

-      Long-term retention and versioning - that let you keep different copies (full, incremental and differential) for a long-term and recover from any point-in-time (it’s also some way of old repositories archiving)

-      Encryption - all copies should be encrypted to make it impossible to access and decrypt by an intruder

-      Central management - let you eliminate administrative time and costs

Does GitHub Have It? 

Of course not, it was created with completely different purposes so considering GitHub as a backup tool is just wrong. To protect your source code it is worth using third-party GitHub backup software. GitHub even recommends this in its official documentation. So why not combine different tools, enjoy the advantages of each and have a guarantee of source code protection? One is responsible for hosting and authorization, the other for creating reliable backups. Let’s use the GitProtect.io backup example. It has not only the most important features of a good backup but also a transparent UI, web central management console, anytime-anywhere access, and useful audit logs and notifications. It is simply an easy-to-use yet professional backup software tool that works great with our GitHub repositories (and is available on GitHub Marketplace).