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I suspect preserving git history is allowed for the purpose of determining copyright compliance.

There's an exception 'for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.', but there's situations where that would not apply. E.g. commits fixing a single spelling mistake are probably not copyrightable.

Also, I doubt you can just keep a copy of all data you ever process, just because it might some day be useful as legal evidence.

Why would you say that? If you can get sued for a piece of code written 30 years ago, then it seems legitimate to me to store legal evidence for at least 30 years. As far as I know there is no time limit to being sued over something.

That makes sense for repository users keeping a private copy.

But, I was thinking more about companies like Github. If they can hide behind that clause for every single repo they host, the GDPR as a whole becomes useless. Pretty much everything could serve as evidence one day. As far as I know, judges don't like 'hacks' like that.

Also, additionally, code hosting platforms argue they are service providers and should not be liable for copyright infringement as long as they apply notice and takedown.

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