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Niraj Kumar
Niraj Kumar

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What If GitHub Goes Down Tomorrow?

#github #productivity #tutorial #automation

Don’t Build Your Castle on Rented Land — A Practical Guide to Mirrors, Backups, and a One-Hour DR Playbook

Imagine waking up and your primary platform is gone for a week.
No push, no pull, no deploy — customers waiting, roadmap frozen.

If your startup’s lifeline is its code and cloud, depending on any single vendor is like building a castle on rented land: great location, zero ownership.

This guide shows how to
(1) mirror your repos for free,
(2) keep cold backups you actually test, and
(3) run a one-hour “game day” so an outage becomes a speed bump — not a cliff.

Rented Land: Why Platform Risk Is Real

Modern software is built on incredible infrastructure — but convenience hides dependency.
Here’s why that’s dangerous:

  • Big clouds do fail.

  • Catastrophic deletions happen.

  • Compliance lockouts cripple startups.

    • In November 2025, The Register reported that Google Cloud suspended a paying customer’s production account over ambiguous “compliance” issues — locking engineers out of systems three separate times without clear explanation. 👉 The Register: Google Cloud suspended customer’s account

  • Collateral outages cascade across the web.

    • BBC News chronicled another major global cloud disruption in late 2025, showing how thousands of services were instantly affected when regional DNS and API gateways failed. 👉 BBC News Report

Thesis: Cloud is amazing — but it’s infrastructure you rent.
Your resilience comes from designing for independence: redundant remotes, portable data, tested restores, and written failover plans.

Step 1 — Hot Mirrors (Zero-Cost)

Use Bitbucket Free (unlimited private repos, 5 users) as a hot mirror. Or use GitLab Free.
Add it as a second remote and sync daily.

# One-time setup
git remote add bitbucket git@bitbucket.org:yourworkspace/yourrepo.git
git push --mirror bitbucket
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If GitHub ever fails:

git remote set-url origin git@bitbucket.org:yourworkspace/yourrepo.git
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Automate a nightly sync on a tiny VPS:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
WORKDIR=/opt/mirror/your-repo
GH=git@github.com:your-org/your-repo.git
BB=git@bitbucket.org:yourworkspace/your-repo.git

mkdir -p "$(dirname "$WORKDIR")"
[ -d "$WORKDIR/.git" ] || git clone --mirror "$GH" "$WORKDIR"
cd "$WORKDIR"
git remote set-url origin "$GH"
git remote add bb "$BB" 2>/dev/null || true
git remote update --prune
git push --mirror bb
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Schedule via cron:

0 1 * * * /opt/mirror/mirror-to-bitbucket.sh >> /var/log/mirror.log 2>&1
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Step 2 — Cold, Offline Backups (Portable + Encrypted)

A git bundle is a single self-contained file with your entire history.
Encrypt it and store it across two providers (e.g., Cloudflare R2 + Backblaze B2).

REPO=/repos/your-repo
OUT=/backups/your-repo-$(date +%F).bundle
( cd "$REPO" && git bundle create "$OUT" --all --tags )
gpg -c "$OUT"
rclone copy "$OUT.gpg" r2:repo-backups/
rclone copy "$OUT.gpg" b2:repo-backups/
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Restore anytime:

git clone your-repo-2025-11-01.bundle your-repo
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Step 3 — Don’t Forget “Other Data”

  • Issues / PRs: Export weekly using GitHub CLI: 
  gh issue list --state all --json number,title,author > issues.json
  gh pr list --state all --json number,title,author > prs.json
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  • Container Images / Packages: Mirror GHCR → Docker Hub or GitLab Registry using crane: 
  crane copy ghcr.io/your-org/app:main registry.gitlab.com/your-org/app:main
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  • Secrets / Infra-as-Code: Store secrets in Vault or 1Password, not CI configs. Keep Terraform + Ansible scripts versioned for instant re-deployment.

Step 4 — One-Hour Disaster-Recovery “Game Day”

  1. Assume GitHub is offline.
  2. Switch remote → Bitbucket.
  3. Run CI/CD from the mirror.
  4. Restore a bundle into a fresh folder and verify build.
  5. Fix gaps and document them.

Do this every quarter. Backups you never test are faith, not strategy.

“Castle on Rented Land”: Lessons for Founders

What You Don’t Own What To Do Instead
Cloud Accounts Keep backups & mirrored orgs
CI/CD Runners Define workflows for 2 systems
Authentication Have break-glass owners + 2FA recovery
Data Export weekly to neutral formats
Monitoring Add your own black-box uptime monitors

Ownership = Optionality.
Vendor failure shouldn’t equal your failure.

Minimal Cost, Maximum Resilience

Layer Tooling Cost Frequency
Code Mirror Bitbucket Free / GitLab Free ₹ 0 Daily
Offline Bundles R2 + Backblaze ₹ 500–1 000 / mo Weekly
CI Fallback Jenkins / Woodpecker ₹ 0–800 / mo Quarterly
Game Day 60-min drill ₹ 0 Every Quarter

✅ TL;DR Checklist

  • [ ] Add secondary remote (Bitbucket/GitLab).
  • [ ] Nightly cron to push --mirror.
  • [ ] Weekly encrypted .bundle to two clouds.
  • [ ] Export issues / PRs / wiki.
  • [ ] Define CI on two platforms.
  • [ ] Store 2FA + deploy keys in vault.
  • [ ] Run DR game day every quarter.

Final Thought

GitHub’s reliability is extraordinary — but your resilience shouldn’t depend on it.
Cloud is rented land.
Your code, your backups, your mirrors, and your process — those are your castle walls.

Spend one evening setting this up.
You’ll sleep like an architect who owns their own land.

References

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