[simondotau]

If the repo is on GitHub and two or more developers keep reasonably up-to-date checkouts on their local computers, the “3-2-1” principle of backups is satisfied.

Additionally to that, if any of those developers have a backup strategy for their local computer, those also count as a backup of that source code.

[wewewedxfgdf]

CTO explaining that to the CEO when your source code is completely gone:

CTO: "I know our entire github repo is deleted and all our source code is gone and we never took backups, but I'm hoping the developers might have it all on their machines."

CEO: "Hoping developers had it locally was your strategy for protecting all our source code?"

CTO: "It's a sound approach and ticks all the boxes."

CEO: "You're fired."

Board Directors to CEO: "You're fired."

[Tohsig]

Technically true, but only if we consider dev checkouts as "backups". In the majority of cases they probably are, but that's not guaranteed. The local repo copy could be in a wildly different state than the primary origin, a shallow clone, etc... While the odds of that mattering are very low, they're not zero. I personally prefer to have a dedicated mirror as a failsafe.

[koonsolo]

The benefit of DVCS. Losing the source code from github when it's all on local computers is the least of problems.