[blainesch]

In the "why" section you list 3 reasons.

> In case something happens to GitHub. More generally because keeping your data in the cloud and relying on the cloud to back it up is foolish

I disagree, cloud backups are more reliable.

> In case someone takes down a repository that you were interested in. If you run github-backup with your username, it will back up all the repositories you have watched and starred.

If the repo goes down it's already going to be a lot harder to use, but it seems easier to fork a repo.

> So you can keep working on your repository while on a plane, or on a remote beach or mountaintop. Just like Linus intended.

When have you not been able to work on a local repo locally?

Overall, I think I'm missing the point.

[pyre]

> I disagree, cloud backups are more reliable.

You're taking this out of context. It does not download this data from Github, and then remove the data from Github. So the data is still "backed up" in the cloud, but is also now backed up locally. How is this not more reliable?

This also does not preclude the ability to push your backup to another cloud provider (e.g. S3, Dropbox, etc) to distribute your backups across the cloud.

> If the repo goes down it's already going to be a lot harder to use, but it seems easier to fork a repo.

A fork does not maintain things like comments and issues on the original repo, which github-backup does backup.

> When have you not been able to work on a local repo locally?

Github does not stick things like Github Comments or Github Issues directly into your repository. If you are (e.g.) relying on Github Issues to track things to do on your repo, then you're out of luck on a plane without access to that.

> Overall, I think I'm missing the point.

It seems like you've ignored the list of things that github-backup actually does, and commented on it from that point of view. He lists the things that github-backup does, but you have commented on none of them. For example, why did I have to explain to you that it backs up Github Comments and Github Issues on your repository? Were you under the impression that these things were already in your repo? Do you use Github without these things to the point were you didn't know that they existed, or can't see the use-case where someone would use them? I'm a little confused.

[detaro]

Not the author, but possible answers:

> I disagree, cloud backups are more reliable.

Cloud backups, maybe. Data that's only in the cloud (e.g. on GitHub) is not more reliable than data that is in the cloud and backed-up by you to somewhere else (to a different cloud, if you want).

> If the repo goes down it's already going to be a lot harder to use, but it seems easier to fork a repo.

Which means you have to maintain an up-to-date fork, you loose the issues etc from the original repo, and if a repo is DMCAd your GitHub-fork is gone as well.

> When have you not been able to work on a local repo locally?

If you wanted to read the issues, or PRs by other people that you didn't manually copy.

I really like the project, it should make it easier to make sure I always have a copy of important stuff available. Just need to figure out what's the best way of telling it which repos I care enough about (I star to much stuff).

EDIT: take a look at the issues though, it has some annoying limitations

[lucaspiller]

> In case something happens to GitHub. More generally because keeping your data in the cloud and relying on the cloud to back it up is foolish

Instead of the cloud, I read that as "the hands of a company that may get sold, shutdown, agendas may change, etc". I don't think that will happen with GitHub anytime soon, but 10 years ago I would have said the same about Sourceforge :-)

[fapjacks]

That is usually how it goes, isn't it? People kill the golden goose because they start to think their platform is invincible and the laws of physics don't apply to them anymore. Then they become vulnerable to all kinds of problems.

[realusername]

It could help for example in the case of a DCMA takedown, thanks to the backup, you won't lose all the issues this way.

[sebastianavina]

in case you dont want to clone a repo... i guess...