The intellectual property became the most valuable asset within companies. Actually, it has never been more important than now once businesses globally create an infinite amount of source code, which in the IT world is the intellectual property itself. We can not afford to lose this value – nor does your business.

Git Repository Backup – What It Is?

In the backup world, we divide people into two groups – those who do backups and those who will (once they encounter any event of failure). So we not should but rather want to belong to the first group. When a disaster strikes or your employee makes some mistake it is better to have a copy of your data that you can restore to keep your business running interruptedly. We should pay more attention to the data protection aspect, especially as crashes or cyberattacks are already commonplace. Now let’s focus on source code and git version control system. Because contrary to what you might think, git shouldn’t be considered a backup.

Self-Made Git Backup Scripts

Someone may say that using services like GitHub itself is sufficient data protection. And we will say that it is not, because ransomware attacks, human errors, or outages happen to such service providers on a daily basis. So once we discover it, we try to do backup ourselves. And we often do that but it can be a very dangerous and paradoxically expensive, game. Using the Git functionality, we can create our own scripts that will let us create backups, but it requires a lot of manual work, administration, constant monitoring, and updating of these scripts. Additionally, we need to invest in storage – we need the place where we will store those copies. In a long term, this grows to absurd dimensions, time-consuming procedures, and actually, we entrust our data protection in hands of only one, overworked employee. So we have to agree – it’s not smart at all.

Third-Party Software

So here comes a rescue – external third-party backup made by professionals. Software specifically developed by an external company and then used by other companies in their own projects. Trusted, proven, with years of experience. Let’s make it more visual on payment systems example. Imagine that you build your own e-commerce website. Instead of creating our own payment module, it is easier and faster (and often cheaper) to use ready-made external solutions. Well, even the biggest e-commerce businesses use external payment modules so it’s not a coincidence.

So why do you want to build and maintain your own script when it comes to something as much important as source code and your intellectual property? It is a way easier, cheaper, and secure with a third-party Bitbucket and GitHub backup solution. It will make fully manageable, automated copies of your cloud and local repositories and metadata, notify you with emails or audit logs and in the event of failure, you will be able to restore your repos and metadata to another repository or even crossover to another hosting platform (so just think about migration possibilities). And that’s not all of the benefits! We do not have to waste time and costs on building our own system or creating scripts manually. We can focus on developing our business, leaving the matter of security and backup to the professionals.