Metadata Backups

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 learn how to view the details of a backup on the Backup Details and Metadata 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

• A clone of a Wiki repository

• All Git LFS objects

• All Topics

• All Milestones

• All Labels

• All Issues

• All Ogranization's Projects

  • Except Projects V2 Views, because of missing GitHub API

  • Except Projects V2 Workflows, because of missing GitHub API

• 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, because of GitHub API restriction.

  • Except pull-requests from forks, because of GitHub API restriction.

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:

ZIP archive content

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.

Metadata that is not included due to GitHub API restrictions

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

• Personal ProjectV2: No access to personal projects using GitHub Apps. Only organization's projects are accessible.

• Organization's ProjectV2 Views and Workflows: Restore is limited: There is no API to restore views and workflows.

Learn More

• Dashboard Overview

• Password-Protected Backups

• Card View

• Table View

• Repository Details