Have you ever thought that some day your git remote repository service account got banned or even their server went down? It always crossed my mind and if that happen i would lose all my source code. So in this post i’m gonna explain how to backup your git repository locally and to other git remote repository services.
Skip-able Part
Git is a version control system for tracking any changes in any set of files. It’s basically a tool that makes tracking changes on your code easier, so you would know which line fix a certain bug and so on.
There’re a lot of git remote repository such as github, gitlab, bitbucket, codeberg and so on. The most popular one is github, but like other platform, github could decide whether to let you continue in their platform or banned you in their platform. You can check an article about github banned developer account on here and it seems like github in the process of restoring access to all developer in iran, you can check the github CEO tweet here .
You might be thinking “well, i’m not on those country so why should i worry about that?”. My point is not about the country that got banned, but about what would you do if your account got banned and all access to you code was gone. We can’t take anything for granted these days so better start backup your git repository rather than regret it later.
Backup Git Repository
First of all, there’re two ways you can backup a git repository that i knew. The first one is to backup locally in your machine, and the second one is to backup on multiple platforms or even on your own server.
Backup Git Repository Locally
There’re two ways to backup your git repository locally on your local machine, that is clone everything (basically the normal git clone command) and clone git bare.
Clone Everything in Git Repository
You can backup every file in your git repository by doing the normal git clone <git-url.git> command. By doing that, you download every file in your repository with their actual size and you can do git workflow in it.
It’s basically the usual way to clone a git repository.
Clone Git Bare
You can backup only the git bare from a git repository. To make it simpler, git bare is a .git directory when you initialize a directory as a git repository using git init command.
So if you clone the git bare instead of the full git repository, you can get all commit history and all the branch on your git repository without actually downloading all your file so the git bare size is quite small.
You might ask “if you didn’t download all your file then how you called that a backup?”. Ok so here’s the thing, by cloning a git bare you backup all your commit history and if you decide to upload your git repository to another git services or even your own server, you just need to push those git bare backup and git gonna create all your file with all the commit history on the new git repository. So basically you have your git repository backup without taking too much space on your local storage.
So, how can you backup using git bare clone? git have a backup mechanism but it’s not obvious, git has a --mirror flag that you can use to backup or push a git bare repository.
First, you need to clone a git bare from git repository by doing
git clone --bare <git-repo-url.git>
or
git clone --mirror <git-repo-url.git>
Both of the commands are basically the same, you can push using
--mirrorflag or add git remote repository and then push using the usual command. How to push with git bare repository is later in this post.
Here’s an example, if i want to clone my instasaver git bare then the command i need is
git clone --bare https://github.com/bruhtus/instasaver.git
or
git clone --mirror https://github.com/bruhtus/instasaver.git
and then it’s gonna make instasaver.git directory where it stores all the commit history and branch.
If your git repository contains Git Large File Storage (LFS) objects then you need to download those git LFS objects too. First, you clone git bare with one of the command above (--mirror flag or --bare flag) and then download git LFS object with this command
git lfs fetch --all
Don’t forget to change directory (
cd) into your git bare directory before applying those command.
Backup Git Repository on Multiple Platforms
There’re two ways you can backup your git repository on multiple platforms. First, you can use git remote add command, and second, you can push git bare repository into another git services. Uploading into your own server is beyond the scope of this post, so i’m not gonna explain about that here.
Add Git Remote Repository
With git remote add you can add another platform so that you can also push into that platform.
For example, your main git repository service is github so you usually do
git remote add origin <github-repo-url.git>
in your local git repository. That command is basically assign origin as your github repository, so if you want to push into your github repository you need to do
git push origin <branch>
if you didn’t like origin as your github repository alias, you can change it to whatever you want, you can change it into github or even anu but you also need to change your git push command like this
git push github <branch>
or
git push anu <branch>
So if you want to add another platform and you have your full git working directory (not git bare version), you just need too assign another git repository service url.
For example, i want to add instasaver to gitlab. I just need to do
git remote add gitlab https://gitlab.com/bruhtus/instasaver.git
and then if i want to push the changes to master branch, i just need to do
git push gitlab master
other git workflow such as git add and git commit is the same.
Don’t forget to change directory (
cd) into your local git repo directory.
Push Git Bare
If you alreaady backup your git bare repository on your local machine, then all you gotta do is change directory (cd) into your git-bare-repo.git directory and then do
git push --mirror <new-git-repo-url.git>
or you could also do
git remote add <platform> <new-git-repo-url.git>
git push <platform> <branch>
You can change
<platform>name to whatever you want such asanuornganu, you do you.
The difference between both command is that you can get all the branch if you use git push --mirror meanwhile you only get main branch if you use the usual git push command (without --mirror flag). So if you want to backup all the branch then you should probably use git push --mirror.
The disadvantage of using git bare is that you cannot use git workflow such as git add or git commit, you can only use git push command. If you want to update your git bare repository, you can do
git remote update
inside your git bare directory.
If you have Git Large File Storage (LFS) objects, you need to push git LFS object separately using this command
git lfs push --all <new-git-repo-url.git>
after you download all git LFS objects using git lfs fetch --all command.
The Conclusion
Do this post really need a conclusion? well, whatever, here we go.
There’s no harm in backing up your git repository whether locally or on multiple platform, we can’t be so sure that some platform gonna stay the same. Maybe the platform we use gonna become worse and mindlessly banned a lot of account, who knows. So it’s better to start backup your git repository from now on before something like that happen.