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Comment by smaslennikov | Hacker News Reader

You make a good point, I'm surprised to see it downvoted.

It's always a risk to put IP in a bucket you may lose access to just because of politics.

Git is a distributed system, so even if you lose access there isn't a huge data loss.

Unfortunately, github is 50% git, 50% proprietary code that you don't control and can't neatly export your data for other platforms. All these git hosts are walled Gardens. It's a sad state of affairs but not really limited to git (Gmail walled Garden despite email standard, messaging apps, etc).

Github has some great management tools for reviewing code and integrating with various integrations. But so does Gitlab, Bitbucket... and I'm sure there are more. They aren't 1 for 1 replacements, but they do exist. I'd personally recommend against using a ton of integrations that tightly bound you to any service.

Yes, they all have great tools on top of git, but they are all different and hard to transfer between platforms.

Yes, making daily on-premise backups would mitigate the risk of losing source code.

That applies to everyone, not just Iranian developers: setup daily backups of all your code.

Even more than that, as long as one person has the repo cloned you can bootstrap the entire project again, any single clone has the entire project history to the most recent point it was fetched. Git is neat that way.

That's not necessarily true. If your organization has tens of repositories with multiple important branches in each, all odds that at least some of those branches are lost.

Proper backups of all repos are an answer, of course.

The way we use git, master has everything that is production with short-lived feature branches for development work. Not needing to worry about git backups is perhaps the least of the benefits of this approach (and no real drawbacks as far as I can tell).

That’s true if you use it the way its creator does, but not so much when you replace git send-mail with GitHub’s proprietary extensions (issues, etc).

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