Backup Contents
Detailed overview of what's included in Cloudback backups for GitHub repositories, including issues, pull requests, labels, and API-related limitations.
Cloudback backs up your GitHub repositories, including both the code and important metadata such as issues, pull requests, milestones, and other data. This document explains what is included in a GitHub backup and what is not.
You can learn how to view the details of a backup on the Backup Details page.
What is Included in a Backup?
Here is the list of repository's data in a backup archive:
A bare clone of a git repository (equivalent to
git clone --bare, which includes all branches, tags, and refs)A clone of a Wiki repository
All Git LFS objects
All Topics
All Milestones
All custom Labels (GitHub's default labels like
bug,enhancement,documentationare excluded since they are automatically created with new repositories)All Issues and Issue Comments
All Sub-Issues
All Issue Types (organization accounts only)
All Repository Projects (ProjectV2), including:
Project fields (custom fields, iterations, single-select options)
Project items (issues, draft issues, field values)
Project views (layout, filters, sort, grouping)
Project workflows (automation rules)
Project status updates (health, dates, body)
All Commit Comments
All Releases including release asset binary files
Repository Metadata (description, settings, merge configuration, visibility, license)
All Collaborators
All Webhooks
Except secret tokens. Secret tokens must be set manually after restore
All Pull Requests, including:
Pull request reviews (approvals, change requests, comments)
Review comments (inline code comments with diff context)
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 JSON files (one per data type) in the same format downloaded from the GitHub API. For example, the files containing issues, milestones, and labels are named issues.json, milestones.json, labels.json respectively:
If you want Cloudback to add any additional metadata into a backup, please contact support or just create a feature request and the team will consider implementing it.
Metadata that is Not Included
However, Cloudback's ability to back up metadata is constrained by either the limitations of the GitHub API or features not yet implemented in Cloudback.
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 complete or all-inclusive.
Please report it if there is a mistake or the API is changed - the team will fix it as soon as possible. Here is the list of metadata that is not included in a backup:
Not yet implemented
Deploy Keys: Not included in backup yet
Autolinks: Not included in backup yet
GitHub API restrictions
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: backed up, but cannot be restored — GitHub API rejects PR creation with
No commits between feature-branch and main-branchPull Requests from forks: backed up, but cannot be restored — the source branch is in the fork of the original repository, and there is no API to create a PR from an old fork into a newly created repository
Discussions: There is no API to restore discussion categories
Personal ProjectV2: No access to personal projects using GitHub Apps. Only organization and repository projects are accessible.
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