When you do this, make sure that the server has continuous backups. Also, make sure you still have an offsite backup.
Once you figure out what these things are worth, you may realize that you should probably just keep paying Github.
There are many other good reasons for a service like Github, like the excellent collaboration features, the really good repository and history browser or the good bugtracker.
If you don't need those (small team, working alone) but are concerned about uploading your intellectual property to a third party server in a potentially foreign country (depending on your location), then quickly setting up gitosis / gitweb / redmine might be enough for you.
In my personal case, I would really love to use github even for my small team, but I'm too concerned about the legal issues to go ahead with that (and the local installation is plain too expensive).
Might sound unlikely but it happens.
Also, if github is down or your repo with them is corrupted, you have to go through their support. If your own server has a problem you can fix it instantly.
I'm not convinced that reliability is the correct reason to go GitHub. Features: Yes. Reliability: Not necessarily.
Data safety is all about fighting correlation. You don't back up one partition to another on the same spindle, because when the drive dies the whole spindle is lost. Paranoid people back up to two different drives, two different disk controllers, two different machines, two different datacenters, two different continents...
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[1] But nonzero. It is worth thinking about the scenarios.
In addition to the remote repos on Github and my normal local copies...
QED.
I can't imagine that GitHub would steal your code. They've never heard of you, they have no reason to believe your code is worth anything to them, and one "I have pretty damn good evidence that GitHub stole my code" could ruin their entire business.
You mentioned legal issues. Are you afraid someone's going to ... subpoena your code or something? Because if that happens, you'd have to turn it over anyway.
They've got some pretty intense-looking security[1], and people like Twitter trust them with their code[2]. If they aren't worried, why are you?
1: http://help.github.com/security/
2: I don't know that that's officially known, but I saw Twitter commenting on the "GitHub now has Organizations" post complaining about the lack of the cheaper plan that they added the next day. So they definitely have some private repos on GitHub.
Not if you don't live in the US.
Of course, I could always trust them for now and instantly remove my stuff when there are signs of trouble, but I asked them (a year ago) whether deletions are instant and irreversible and they told me the usual thing: repositories are not instantly deleted so they could restore them in case of accidental deletions. In addition they stay around in backups for an indefinite time.
Legislation not known well enough and no control over the removal of my code from their machines - call me paranoid, but these are good reasons not to upload my code to them.
So github can be a part of a backup strategy but it isn't a strategy by itself.
Likewise, there are plenty of parties that wouldn't dream of storing their data in a third party repository, it could be compromised, there are at least 'n' github employees that now have access to your data etc.
So there is a need for both options, one where you outsource your headache to github and keep a couple of local copies just in case, another where you do have your own repository that you control with the associated backup mechanisms and a number of off-site copies.
Fortunately github makes it easy to do the former and git itself can make it (relatively) easy to do the latter.
For plenty of people the first is enough. For me it wouldn't work, so I'm really happy this got posted.
It runs in cron and backs up all my data daily.
I love GitHub and I'm sure they'll continue to do well, but running your own Git server is only going to get easier. If you don't need the social side of what they offer, hosting yourself makes sense.
mv $ZIP_FILE_NAME $ZIP_FILE_NAME.txtYou can also stick a git repo on top of Dropbox... There are several articles about how to do this if you do a quick google.
Whether or not this makes you "decentralized" depends on where your directories live. Two machines in the same location? Not decentralized.
Given the decentralised nature of Git, having continuous backups becomes less important unless all my computers (including the server) fail at once.
But yes, backups are important, and they are done.