[jpeterson]

I imagine part of the use case is "quickly and easily getting back to a snippet within one of those old files", in which case the tarball and archive method won't really work.

[bruceboughton]

He's talking about tarring a local git repository. You can still use all the git history stuff, you're just backing up using tar rather than via git push/pull.

[rawsyntax]

I keep a local copy of old git repos on my harddrive. I backup my harddrive religiously. Provided you don't have giant repos, this works well