For Project Elara we are deeply concerned that someone might delete our repositories (oh no!) or even delete our Codeberg organization, which would cause permanent and irreversible loss of data (please no!). This can happen in at least two ways:
- Accidental deletion if somehow an admin accidentally presses the delete button and then absentmindedly enters the confirmation dialog
- Deliberate deletion: if somehow the organization becomes out of our control and someone does it against our will
It is not enough to put up an organizational policy that says “do not ever delete the org”; we need some backup system in place to mirror all of our repositories1. And not just our repositories - this includes everything on our codeberg, including issues, PRs, releases, etc. since a lot of our collaboration happens on there too.
We currently do not have the infrastructure to do so ourselves. However, we must implement this at some point, because this is a serious issue.
Update: a promising project archival system (that archives snapshots of our websites, repos, etc.) is Webrecorder, which is built on the
pywblibrary. If we can get it set up, all weblinks in the project should provide an alternate link to the latest backed-up version in Webrecorder to avoid broken links (although it should also have some sort of badge saying “this page was archived atYYYY-MM-DD, the most recent version of the site can be found athttps://INSERT_SOME_URL”)
Footnotes
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By this, we mean open-source mirrors, like those at colleges and other institutions. We do not mean places like GitHub, which are proprietary. We may be willing to use self-hosted GitLab as a mirror. ↩