How do you backup your projects?

Having a well-thought-out backup strategy can help you to avoid the crushing feeling that comes with finding out that all your projects are gone.

There are lots of ways to back up your data from personal SSDs and flash drives to repository hosting services like GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket to various cloud storages like Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive.

What methods have you tried and what worked best for you?

Comments

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

GitHub, sometimes private, repos?

In reality, I copy ~/projects to external hard disk before formatting my computer. (with rsync to prevent copying node_modules)

[Tom Granot]

I format my computer, recall I had a lingering shell script in my home directory that I really needed, reconstruct it from scratch, name it something weird that doesn't get backed up properly, forget to use it for a while, format my computer.

Repeat x \infty.

:)

[Karan Gandhi]

Keep multiple copies on multiple hard disks/DVDs/storage media(atleast 2) and some on online SCM like bitbucket/gitlab/your-server.

Make a Note on how to build the project with exact dependencies cos by the time I have to reuse it the build instructions might be incompatible with my current system.
Keep installers of all tools required because you may never know when a tool gets deprecated.

Have multiple backup strategies since every strategy has a weakness.

[Vlastimil Pospichal]

I use GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket for my projects. Google Drive is for medias and tutorials. All data are saved to external HDD too.

[Galuh Utama]

I have a private git repository at home, hosted in a small energy-saving server, that is reachable over VPN. It has 2 NAS grade drives, that are configured as RAID 1 (mirrored). Once a week, important data of those drives are backed up to an external drive.

All repositories are cloned to my laptop and workstation PC and are kept up-to-date.

Thinking about backing up to cloud too (with encryption, of course), but I still don't trust cloud providers.

[shadowtime2000]

Github because nothing I do is so important it has to be private.

[Abdul Qoyyuum]

Public repos = Github
Private repos = Bitbucket
Password DB (Keepass and SSH Keys) = Syncthing and Thumbdrive

Currently looking at putting my private container images somewhere for free.

[Alex Janke]

Any specific reason why you split your private and public repos between GitHub and Bitbucket?

[Abdul Qoyyuum]

At first it was a MS scare after they took over GitHub. It was fine but still have trust issues with them. Also at the time, GitHub Actions wasn't publicly available and I need my pipelines for automated CI/CD

[Adrian Emil Grigore]

I usually use GitHub and also on my VPS-es I use rclone.org/ with mega.com/ on my $HOME twice a day.

[Andreas Szekely]

I use GitHub with private repositories, and for the public ones I use a separate private repo with the dotnet files for each project

[Arturo Espinoza Quintero]

I always use GitHub and every end of semester I back up no projects in a hard drive

[Benjamin Saul]

Private Github, and lots and lots of hard drives.

[Uday Yadav]

For small projects/projects i don't think will need anymore, i have created a repository where i dump the whole project.

[Eng Soon Cheah]

DevOps Repo

[Ulrich]

GitHub repo for private projects.