Listen to this articleInterview with Daniel Heitz from BackHub team – makers of GitHub backup service.
BackHub team created tool they needed in their every day work. Since they realized that they are not the only ones who need backups of GitHub running projects and archive of inactive repositories, they decided to offer BackHub as a service.
Q: What is BackHub?
A: BackHub is a backup service for public and private GitHub Repositories. It allows you to protect your data and save money on your GitHub plan by archiving repositories to BackHub. It enables you to back up and restore repositories with a single click.
Q: How did you come up the idea?
A: Initially we’ve built an alpha version of BackHub, because we needed it in our day to day work. Since we realized that we are not the only ones who need backups of running projects and a way to archive our inactive repositories, we’ve decided to offer our tool as a service.
We’ve have been using GitHub over two years now and it has become a linchpin in our project development process. GitHub is the place where we communicate, from epics and stories to actual tasks, from product specifications to the definition of done.
Considering that, all our business value is in the cloud, placed in a proprietary system we can’t control, we needed a program that would give us additional safety to preserve our work. We could install GitHub Enterprise on our own servers but it’s just not profitable for a small team like us.
We need BackHub because we wanted to backups all repositories including all meta data (Issues, Milestones etc. because they contain valuable information) and archive inactive projects to have space for new projects.
Q: How does BackHub work and what is possible to backup?
A: We backup the complete repository including all branches and meta data associated with it. We try to include as much meta data as possible, which is currently:
-Issues; who filed the issue, comments, asignee, labels
-Milestones; Description, Due date, Associated issues
-Wiki
-Line Notes
-Commit comments
-Releases
Q: What was technically the most challenging part of developing BackHub?
A: Backing up a repository is not that hard, there are many open source projects out there doing that. Most of them don’t work for private repositories though. It becomes tricky when you want to restore a backup back to GitHub – what is a backup worth if you can’t restore it properly? So we put a lot of effort in this part.
Q: How would you describe three biggest benefits of using BackHub?
A: Archive private repositories and save money on your plan. Protect all your data including issues, milestones, wiki and more. Backup and restore with a single click.
Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We are currently working on features like backing up multiple repositories and recurring backups. For the long term we are thinking about offering a backup platform for other cloud services but also planning to work on other products improving your GitHub workflow.
Activate Social Media:
