GitHub Backup and Restore: A Disaster Recovery Guide
Your GitHub repositories are not just lines of code. They are months or years of engineering effort, institutional knowledge embedded in commit history, and the foundation your product runs on. Losing them is not a minor inconvenience. It can halt your entire business.
Yet most teams treat GitHub backup and restore as an afterthought, if they think about it at all. This guide walks you through why disaster recovery matters for your code, the real threats you face, and how to build a backup and restore workflow that actually holds up when things go wrong.
If you are looking for a broader overview of protecting your GitHub data, start with our complete guide to backing up GitHub.
Why Disaster Recovery Matters for Code
Think about what lives inside your repositories. Application source code, infrastructure-as-code configurations, CI/CD pipeline definitions, documentation, migration scripts, environment configurations. For most software companies, the codebase is the product. Everything else, the servers, the domains, the cloud accounts, can be rebuilt or replaced. The code and its history cannot.
When a repository disappears or gets corrupted, development stops. Engineers cannot ship features, fix bugs, or deploy patches. Every hour of downtime translates directly into lost revenue, missed deadlines, and frustrated customers. For regulated industries like finance or healthcare, losing code history can also mean failing an audit, which carries its own set of consequences.
Despite this, many teams rely entirely on GitHub as both their primary and only copy of their source code. That is not a backup strategy. That is a single point of failure.
Real-World Scenarios That Cause Data Loss
Data loss is not hypothetical. It happens to teams of every size, and it usually happens at the worst possible time. Here are the most common scenarios.
Accidental Force Push or Branch Deletion
This is the most common cause of lost work. A developer runs git push --force on the wrong branch, or someone deletes a branch that had not been merged yet. Git's reflog can sometimes help on a local machine, but if the local clone is gone or the force push has already propagated, that work is lost from GitHub. The more contributors you have, the higher the probability of human error.
Compromised GitHub Account
If an attacker gains access to a GitHub account with admin privileges, they can delete repositories, rewrite history, or exfiltrate private code. Credential leaks happen more often than most teams realize. Leaked tokens in CI logs, phished passwords, or compromised third-party integrations can all give an attacker the keys to your repositories. Once a repo is deleted by an admin-level account, GitHub's recovery options are limited and time-sensitive.
GitHub Outages
GitHub is reliable, but it is not immune to downtime. GitHub has experienced several notable outages over the years, some lasting hours and affecting core services like pushes, pulls, and the API. During an outage, you cannot access your code, deploy from your pipelines, or review pull requests. If your entire workflow depends on GitHub being available and you have no local or off-site backup, an outage brings your team to a standstill.
Malicious Insider
An employee who is leaving the company, whether voluntarily or not, may delete repositories, wipe branches, or sabotage code before their access is revoked. This is not a paranoid fantasy. It is a well-documented pattern in incident reports across the industry. Even with access controls, the window between an employee's last day decision and IT revoking their permissions can be long enough to cause serious damage.
Compliance Requirements
Regulated industries, including finance, healthcare, and government contracting, often require proof that source code is backed up and recoverable. Auditors want to see that you have a documented backup process, that backups are stored independently from the primary system, and that you have tested your ability to restore. "We use GitHub" is not a compliance-ready answer.
Understanding RTO and RPO for Code Repositories
Two concepts from disaster recovery planning are directly relevant to your GitHub backup strategy: Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum amount of time you can afford to be without your code after an incident. If your RTO is four hours, that means you need to be able to restore your repositories and get developers working again within four hours of discovering a problem. Your RTO determines how fast your restore process needs to be and how accessible your backups need to be.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum amount of work you can afford to lose. If your RPO is 24 hours, you need backups that are no more than 24 hours old. If your RPO is one hour, you need backups running at least every hour. Your RPO directly determines your backup frequency.
For most engineering teams, a reasonable starting point is an RTO of a few hours and an RPO of 24 hours or less. Teams shipping multiple times per day or operating in regulated environments will need tighter targets. The key is to define these numbers before an incident, not during one.
What a Proper Backup and Restore Workflow Looks Like
A reliable GitHub backup and restore workflow has four components. Skip any one of them and you have gaps that will hurt you during a real incident.
1. Automated Scheduled Backups
Manual backups do not work. Someone forgets, someone leaves the team, someone assumes someone else is handling it. Your backups need to run automatically on a defined schedule, covering all repositories, all branches, and all tags. The schedule should align with your RPO. If you cannot afford to lose more than a day of work, your backups need to run at least daily.
For a detailed look at tools that handle this, see our comparison of the best GitHub backup tools.
2. Off-Site Storage
A backup stored on GitHub itself is not a backup. If GitHub goes down, gets compromised, or if your account is locked, you lose both your primary copy and your "backup." Your backups need to live somewhere independent: a separate cloud provider, S3-compatible object storage, or even on-premises storage. The point is that a single event should never be able to take out both your production code and your backups.
3. Backup Verification
A backup you have never tested is a backup you cannot trust. Backups can fail silently. Files can be corrupted, incomplete, or stored in a format that is harder to restore than you expected. You need a process to periodically verify that your backups are intact and that you can actually restore from them. This does not need to be complex, but it does need to happen regularly.
4. Documented Recovery Procedures
When an incident happens, you do not want to be figuring out the restore process for the first time. Write down the steps. Document where backups are stored, how to access them, how to restore a single repository, and how to restore everything. Make sure more than one person on the team knows the process. Recovery documentation should be stored somewhere accessible even if GitHub is down, such as an internal wiki on a separate platform or a shared document.
How to Test Your Backups
Having backups is only half the equation. You need to know they work. Here is a practical approach to backup testing.
Run Restore Drills
Schedule a quarterly restore drill. Pick a repository, restore it from your backup to a fresh location, and verify that the result matches what you expect. This exercise will surface problems you would never find otherwise: permissions issues, missing LFS objects, corrupted archives, or gaps in your recovery documentation.
A good restore drill answers three questions:
Can you actually access and download the backup?
Does the restored repository contain all branches, tags, and commit history?
How long does the full restore process take (and does it meet your RTO)?
Verify Backup Integrity
Beyond full restore drills, run automated checks on your backups. Verify file sizes are reasonable, check that the number of repositories in your backup matches what you expect, and confirm that the most recent backup timestamp aligns with your schedule. These checks can be scripted and run after every backup job.
Document What You Find
Every restore drill should produce a short report. What worked, what did not, how long it took, and what needs to change. These reports build confidence over time and give you evidence for compliance audits.
For more detail on backing up individual repos and what to look for, read our guide on how to backup GitHub repositories.
Building a Disaster Recovery Plan for Your GitHub Repositories
Putting it all together, here is what a disaster recovery plan for your code should include:
Inventory your repositories. Know what you have. List every repository, note which are critical to your product, and identify any that contain sensitive data or configuration.
Define your RTO and RPO. Decide how fast you need to recover and how much work you can afford to lose. These numbers drive every other decision.
Set up automated backups. Choose a backup solution that runs on a schedule, covers all your repositories, and stores backups off-site. The backup process should require no manual intervention once configured.
Verify your backups. Implement automated integrity checks and schedule periodic restore drills. Do not assume your backups are good. Prove it.
Document your recovery process. Write clear, step-by-step instructions for restoring repositories from backup. Store this documentation somewhere that does not depend on GitHub being available.
Assign ownership. Someone on the team needs to be responsible for the backup process. That means monitoring backup jobs, running restore drills, and keeping documentation current.
Review and update. Your disaster recovery plan is not a one-time project. Review it whenever you add new repositories, change your infrastructure, or onboard new team members.
How Gitbackups Fits Into Your Disaster Recovery Strategy
The backup side of disaster recovery should not be a time-consuming manual process. That is where Gitbackups comes in.
Gitbackups connects to your GitHub account and automatically backs up all your repositories on a schedule you define. Backups are stored in S3-compatible storage, giving you a fully independent copy of your code that does not depend on GitHub's availability. You connect your access token, choose your backup schedule, and Gitbackups handles the rest.
This means you get:
Automated, scheduled backups that align with your RPO, without building or maintaining custom scripts.
Off-site storage on S3-compatible infrastructure, completely independent from GitHub.
Coverage across all your repositories, so nothing gets missed when new repos are created.
A reliable foundation for the restore and verification steps in your disaster recovery plan.
Gitbackups handles the backup side so your team can focus on what matters most: defining your recovery objectives, documenting your restore procedures, and running the drills that prove your plan works.
Start Building Your Recovery Plan Today
Every team that depends on GitHub for their source code needs a disaster recovery plan. The scenarios that cause data loss are real, they are common, and they do not send advance notice.
The good news is that the hardest part of disaster recovery, the consistent and reliable backup process, is the part you can automate. Get your backups running with Gitbackups, then invest your time in the recovery planning, testing, and documentation that will make the difference when an incident happens.
Your code is too valuable to leave unprotected. Start backing it up today.