it could also happen that github loses data and it's hard to valuate the exact likelihood of you accidentally deleting two repos or github losing a fileserver and its backup.
Also, if github is down or your repo with them is corrupted, you have to go through their support. If your own server has a problem you can fix it instantly.
I'm not convinced that reliability is the correct reason to go GitHub. Features: Yes. Reliability: Not necessarily.
Sure, Github can lose data. And you can lose data. But the advantage is that you and Github are much less correlated; the odds that both of you will lose the data at the same time are fairly low. [1]
Data safety is all about fighting correlation. You don't back up one partition to another on the same spindle, because when the drive dies the whole spindle is lost. Paranoid people back up to two different drives, two different disk controllers, two different machines, two different datacenters, two different continents...
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[1] But nonzero. It is worth thinking about the scenarios.
Agreed. For that exact reason my main dev machine now has hourly local backups through time machine, local HDD clone backups every 4 hours and a separate offsite backup with Mozy.
In addition to the remote repos on Github and my normal local copies...
Agree 100%. Furthermore, it's important not to conflate version control with data backup. Although they share some traits, they have different goals. For example, if I lose my local working copy of a repository before any commits, I've lost valuable work. In absence of a good backup strategy, the existence of the remote repository is of little consolation.
As soon as bandwidth costs come down enough I have a great startup idea: backup copies stored on a different planet/planetoid. Mars. The Moon. Either one. Half-kidding!
Also, if github is down or your repo with them is corrupted, you have to go through their support. If your own server has a problem you can fix it instantly.
I'm not convinced that reliability is the correct reason to go GitHub. Features: Yes. Reliability: Not necessarily.