
Ask HN: Would anyone pay for automatic backups of their Git repos? - warpedjupiter
I&#x27;ve been contemplating the idea of building a little business around a system that automatically backs up a local git repository&#x27;s working tree at regular intervals to a cloud repo. I would add a git command that would allow users to easily find and restore backups with no hassle. It might prevent people from losing work that hadn&#x27;t yet been pushed or committed after an accidental deletion or a hard drive failure. Would anyone pay for this for themselves or their team? I&#x27;ve also thought that it might be interesting to present productivity analytics based upon these regular backups since the data could show more granular detail about working habits as compared to data based off of just commits. Hoping for some validation prior to spending more time building out the application, so any feedback is appreciated.
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flukus
Have you thought about inverting the idea, providing backups of cloud
services?

I see a lot of people/companies operating under the false assumption that they
don't have to backup data that's in the cloud and typically it's a lot harder
than backing up files on a hard drive.

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warpedjupiter
Thanks for your comment! Are you talking about backing up remote Git repos
that are hosted on GitHub, Bitbucket, etc, or are you talking more generally
about backing up any data that is hosted by a cloud service? If the former,
then I'm not sure that I'd personally find the backup of actual data very
useful since all users should have a local copy, but I can potentially see the
use case for a redundant remote in the case that the service's servers are
temporarily down and you don't want your team's workflow to be interrupted. If
the latter, I think that there already some big players in that market and it
might be difficult for a solo developer, like myself, to gain a foothold with
a bootstrapped product.

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flukus
I was thinking about both, but git repos specifically. Aside from the code
itself github comes with a lot of stuff like issue management that only offers
an API to access.

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matthberg
I think this is fundamentally missing the point of Git, which is to fill this
role (which might require modifying user habits to prevent data loss as
described here).

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warpedjupiter
I see your point and agree that this isn't necessarily a problem for
developers that commit and push code really frequently (as we all know we
should). From my experience, though, it isn't uncommon for developers to keep
code in their working tree, on their local machine for days or longer before
pushing it to a remote repo. I've seen multiple people lose a significant
amount of work because they fall victim to the idea that "it won't happen to
me", and I've typically seen their diligence with committing/pushing improve
temporarily until the memory of their disaster fades. If you can successfully
change habits to use Git more effectively to reduce this risk, then I think
that is certainly a good alternative. I wonder if an inexpensive insurance
policy wouldn't be better for many, though, especially since it could backup
the working directory far more frequently than even the most careful Git
users. Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate the response!

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chmaynard
Not me. But to paraphrase PT Barnum, there's a sucker born every minute.

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warpedjupiter
I really have no interest in building software for suckers though, I asked
because I wanted to verify if the idea had real value to anyone :) I
appreciate your feedback!

