Metadata Backups
Last updated
Last updated
Cloudback creates a backup of your GitHub repository's metadata along with the repository itself. This ensures that you can restore your repository to its original state, including all issues, pull requests, milestones, and other metadata. This document explains what is included in a backup and what is not.
You can view the details of a backup to see the metadata that was collected during the backup process. There are two ways to view the details of a backup:
From the Dashboard, when using Card view, click on the Information icon in the list of backups on the card representing the repository.
From the Repository Details page, open the Backups tab and click on the Information icon next to the backup you want to view.
The details include the repository name, the date and time of the backup, the size of the backup, and the collected metadata statistics, such as the number of projects, pull requests, releases, issues, comments, labels and milestones:
Here is the list of repository's data in a backup archive:
A bare clone of a git repository
A clone of a Wiki repository
All Git LFS objects
All Topics
All Milestones
All Labels
All Issues
All Projects
All Commit Comments
All Releases
All Collaborators
All Webhooks except secret tokens. Secret tokens must be set manually after restore
All Pull Requests except pull-requests without commits between branches and pull-requests from forks
You can view the contents of a backup archive by downloading it and extracting the contents. Please note, that for password-protected archives, you will need to enter the password to extract the contents. Metadata is stored as a JSON file per data type in the same format we download it from GitHub. For example, the files containing issues, milestones, and labels are named issues.json, milestones.json, labels.json respectively:
If you want us to add any additional metadata into a backup, please, let us know or just create a feature request and we will consider implementing it.
However, it's important to note that our ability to back up metadata is constrained by the limitations of the GitHub API.
Key points to remember:
your GitHub Account is not included in the backup.
your GitHub Organization is not backed up either.
the backup provided should not be regarded as comprehensive or all-inclusive.
We can't backup or restore this data because of GitHub limitations. Please let us know if there is a mistake or API is changed - we will fix it as soon as possible. Here is the list of metadata that is not included in a backup:
Deploy Keys: Not accessible by GitHub Apps integration API yet
Autolinks: Not accessible by GitHub Apps integration API yet
Environments: There is no API to get environment variable value
Encrypted secrets: There is no API to get an encrypted value
Forks: There is no API
Watchers: There is no API
Stargazers: There is no API
Commit Statuses: There is an API, but it doesn't allow to explore all statuses for a whole repository
Deployments: There is no API to restore completed deployments
Pull Requests without commits: due to an API restriction: validation is failing with a message No commits between feature-branch and main-branch
Pull Requests from forks: a source branch is located in the fork of the old repository. But a new repository is created during a restore process. There is no API the allows us to create a pull-request from an old repository fork into a newly created repository
Discussions: There is no API to restore discussion categories
ProjectV2: There is no API to restore views and columns
