I put a lot of my free software to Github lately. Github is nice, it allows community forks and other great things. But what if it is gone? For that, we have backups. Do we?

We should.

Addy Osmani wrote about backup up your github repositories. He gave
three solution. The second one did not work for me and I was too lazy to debug, the third one required Haskell and some additional libraries (I will learn Haskell, but not at 6am), so I adapted the first solution. It is pretty simple, but used github v2 API and it is no longer supported.

So updated version is here, I also added some shell escaping (although if you backed up someone else’s repository, I suggest checking for filename-significant characters too).

This backups all your public repositories (that’s what I use). I use it with duplicity for secure backup (and restore) by encrypting on client side (please take good care of your PGP private key if you do this).