GitHub provides companies with super-safe features for DevOps. GitHub Enterprise Server is your private copy of GitHub contained within a virtual appliance. It can be hosted on-premise or in the cloud. Actually, you are under the control of its configuration. It ensures your organization with better security, more flexible collaboration options, more effective administration, and moreover - full customization. In this article, we will focus on security, particularly on GitHub Enterprise Backup Utilities, and comparison with third-party GitHub backup solutions, like GitProtect.io.
What is GitHub Enterprise Backup Utilities
The GitHub Enterprise Backup Utilities is an official name for a set of tools provided by GitHub that make consistent and application-aware snapshots of your GitHub Enterprise instance. It’s installed on a separate host. Snapshots are performed in regular intervals over an SSH network connection.
How about features? Well, it performs incremental snapshots, ensures fast backup of only added information, reduces storage usage, and makes sure of the snapshots' integrity.
What is the difference between GitHub Enterprise Backup Utilities and High Availability Replica? Well, this is more a disaster recovery tool that takes snapshots of all major data stores. In the event of failure with these snapshots you can restore your instance to a prior state or make a new one. You don’t have to have another instance all the time like with the High Availability Replica.
GitHub Enterprise Backup Utilities - few more things to keep in mind
First of all, to fully use Backup Utilities it should be run on a host dedicated to long-term storage with network connectivity and the GitHub Enterprise Server appliance. You need to install it on a Linux or other modern Unix operating system.GitHub and actually every cybersecurity expert recommend keeping your backups in two different locations - including at least one cloud storage. In case of any major infrastructure disaster, there is still a separate place you can recover your data from.
Third-party Backup Solution for Your GitHub Enterprise Server
An alternative to the Backup Utilities is a third-party GitHub backup software. There is still a big market niche, but fortunately, there are some solutions like GitProtect.io that decided to fulfill it. First of all, such a solution is dedicated to all GitHub packages - not only GitHub Enterprise so basically, you can use it even for a free GitHub account. Additionally, it offers a full range of professional backup options - full and incremental backups, AES encryption, a fully manageable backup schedule, many rotation schemes (including Grandfather-Father-Son), compression, and long-term retention. Moreover, it’s a complete Disaster Recovery software. So you can not only granularly recover specific repositories and metadata but easily recover all your repositories and metadata to the same or new GitHub instance, cross over to another git hosting service (Bitbucket or GitLab) or on your local machine. Data storage? Use included free cloud storage or bring your own - any S3 compatible cloud or most of the on-premise storages. Your GitHub account has never been so accessible and recoverable.
