github-backup is a simple tool you run in a git repository you cloned from
GitHub. It backs up everything GitHub publishes about the repository,
including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones,
pull requests, watchers, and stars.

## Installation

Several distributions include packages of github-backup, for example
on Debian and Debian derived distributions it can easily be installed
with `sudo apt-get install github-backup`.

To build it from source, first install Haskell's
[stack](http://haskellstack.org/) tool.
For example, on a Debian system:

	sudo apt-get install haskell-stack

Then to build and install github-backup:

	git clone https://git.joeyh.name/git/github-backup.git
	cd github-backup
	stack install

There is also a Makefile, which uses cabal to build, and installs
a man page, bash completion file, etc. This is recommended for use when
making packages of github-backup.

## Use

  Run `github-backup` with no parameters, inside a git repository cloned
  from GitHub to back up that repository.

  Or, if you have a GitHub account, run `github-backup username`
  to clone and back up your account's repositories, as well
  as the repositories you're watching and have starred.

## Why backup GitHub repositories

There are a couple of reasons to want to back this stuff up:

* In case something happens to GitHub. (Some may argue that this has
  already happened.) More generally because keeping your data in the
  cloud *and* relying on the cloud to back it up is foolish.

* 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.

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

## What to expect

Each time you run github-backup, it will find any new forks on GitHub. It
will add remotes to your repository for the forks, using names like
`github_torvalds_subsurface`. It will fetch from every fork.

It downloads metadata from each fork. This is stored
into a branch named "github". Each fork gets a directory in there,
like `torvalds_subsurface`. Inside the directory there will be some
files, like `torvalds_subsurface/watchers`. There may be further
directories, like for comments: `torvalds_subsurface/comments/1`.

You can follow the commits to the github branch to see what information
changed on GitHub over time.

The format of the files in the github branch is currently Haskell
serialized data types. This is plain text, and readable, if you squint.

## Limitations

github-backup is repository-focused. It does not try to back up other
information from GitHub. In particular, social network stuff, like
users who are following you, is not backed up.

github-backup does not log into GitHub, so it cannot backup private
repositories.

Notes added to commits and lines of code don't get backed up yet.
There is only recently API support for this.

The labels that can be added to issues and milestones are not backed up.
Neither are the hooks. They could be, but don't seem important
enough for the extra work involved. Yell if you need them.

github-backup re-downloads all issues, comments, and so on
each time it's run. This may be slow if your repo has a lot of them,
or even if it just has a lot of forks.

Bear in mind that this uses the GitHub API; don't run it every 5 minutes.
GitHub [rate limits](http://developer.github.com/v3/#rate-limiting) the
API to some small number of requests per hour when used without
authentication. To avoid this limit, you can set the environment
variable `GITHUB_OAUTH_TOKEN` to a token obtained from 
<https://github.com/settings/tokens> and
it will log in when making (most) API requests.

Anyway, github-backup *does* do an incremental backup, picking up where it
left off, so will complete the backup eventually even if it's rate limited.

## Author

github-backup was written by Joey Hess <id@joeyh.name>

It is made possible thanks to:

* Mike Burns's [haskell github library](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/github)
* GitHub, for providing an API exposing this data. 
