Comment by Arqu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arqu | Hacker News Reader

The author states that he didnt bother with support (luckily he had a local copy) so here are my 2 cents

I've been in the exact same spot under very similar circumstances. What I can add is that the github support was great, we got it resolved within the working day.

The repo was "deleted" to free up the private repos of my colleague but we didnt know that the fork on my account would go down with it. Its been probably a couple months till we got back to it and noticed the issue. They managed to recover the repo and unblock my fork. I just did a fresh repo and moved everything over.

While it is odd behavior, if its really bad they will probably manage to get you back on your feet.

Also Im not affiliated with github in any way just have some repos from student days over there. If it matters im on gitlab and google repos

So they keep copy of code after it's deleted?

In their business-continuity backups, you'd have to assume yes.

However, I would certainly be surprised if a Github support staff member went and fished out the off-site backup and mounted it to recover one missing repo. You'd hope that would require quite a few staff members to orchestrate.

But in general, yeah. Most engineers don't think about deletion very hard when they start designing a system, and it's also convenient (although with GDPR possibly soon illegal, situation dependent) for auditing and research to merely flag things as deleted and not show them to the customer. As a result, true data deletion generally gets justified away as a bit inconvenient and not really desirable anyway, and almost no software company really deletes anything on demand. Best you can hope for is semi-annual data purges to reclaim disk space.

If this bothers you, consider joining us in the world of self-hosting your services. Gitlab is in my opinion considerably better than Github anyway. Certainly it's worth spinning up a docker container and taking a peek around.

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