Issuekeep takes a daily backup of everything in your GitHub organisation that is not in the git history: issues and their comments, pull requests, review threads, labels, milestones, projects, releases and webhook settings. When something is deleted, you restore it back into GitHub instead of reading it out of an archive file.
Get early accessFrom $18 per month for a whole organisation. The full price list is on this page and you sign up without talking to anyone.
Most teams believe they already have a copy. They have a copy of the source code, which is the part git was designed to duplicate. The decisions live somewhere else.
Running git clone --mirror on every repository gives you branches, tags and history.
It does not fetch a single issue, pull request, review comment or label, because none of them are
stored in the git repository.
GitHub can generate an organisation migration archive on request. GitHub's documentation states that migration archives are automatically deleted after seven days, and the export exists to move an organisation to a different instance rather than to protect the one you have.
GitHub's migration API can start an export but cannot start an import into your organisation. A developer who deletes the wrong repository gets a tar file, and then has to reconstruct four years of review history by hand.
| Your GitHub organisation holds | git clone --mirror | Issuekeep |
|---|---|---|
| Commits, branches, tags | Saved | Saved |
| Issues and their comments | Not saved | Saved daily |
| Pull requests and review threads | Not saved | Saved daily |
| Labels, milestones, projects | Not saved | Saved daily |
| Releases and their attached files | Not saved | Saved daily |
| Webhooks and repository settings | Not saved | Saved daily |
| Restoring any of it back into GitHub | Not possible | One click |
You approve a GitHub App with read access. There is nothing to host, no server to run and no personal access token to pass around your team.
The first backup reads the full history of every repository. After that we only fetch what changed, so a large organisation finishes in minutes and stays inside GitHub's rate limits.
Pick a repository and a date. Issuekeep writes the issues, pull requests, comments and labels back into your organisation through the GitHub API, or hands you the whole thing as a file if you prefer.
You pay the tier your organisation fits in, and you keep that price for as long as you stay subscribed.
Leave your email and three answers. You will hear directly from the person building it, and telling us that your team does not need this is a useful answer.
No, not yet. It is being built, and this page is how the first teams are being found. If you sign up you will hear from the person building it before it opens.
That depends on whether your issues and pull requests matter to you. A mirror protects the code and nothing else, so if losing four years of review history would hurt, a mirror is not enough on its own.
You are right, and we will name it: github-backup is free, it is still being worked on,
and its options cover issues, comments, labels, milestones, discussions and attachments. If you are happy
to run it, run it. We are not going to tell you it does not work. Two things are still yours to solve.
First, nobody watches it. A job that stopped six weeks ago looks exactly like a job that ran, until the
day you need it. Second, the copy is the easy half. Putting four hundred issues back into a new
organisation, with their comments and in the right order, is the work, and that is the day nobody wants
to start writing a script. We do those two things. If neither worries you, the free tool is the right
answer and you should keep your $18.
The plan is European object storage, encrypted, under a data processing agreement you can sign. Issuekeep is being built in Denmark, so your data would stay inside the European Union.
Read access through a GitHub App, granted by an organisation owner, and you can remove it yourself at any time. Write access is requested separately and only at the moment you ask for a restore.
Not at first. The first version covers organisations, because that is where losing the planning data costs a team the most.