Archiving Old Git Repositories, Or GitHub Is Too Expensive
December 15th, 2011I think I’m not alone in having many Git repositories, many of them I don’t currently use because they’re from old projects. However, I don’t want to delete them because I might want to refer back to one of them or make a change (which I’m doing right now for a three year old project). I absolutely love GitHub but their pricing is very unfriendly for people like me. Consider this:
I’m using 10 of the 10 private repositories under the Bronze plan, yet barely using any disk space. I have another maybe 15-20 repositories of old projects I’d love to add to GitHub, but upgrading to the level necessary to allow that would cost me $100 a month! That’s way too much for me as an independent developer!
Unfuddle, where I used to store my private repositories until I started paying for GitHub in August, had a more friendly limit but also allowed archiving, where archived projects didn’t count against your main limit. At the same time, they could still be restored into normal projects. Great! Unfortunately in every other way GitHub is superior…
So what’s the solution? Well, I first emailed GitHub to see if I could just buy more private repositories. No dice. If I want to avoid ballooning numbers of projects but stay on GitHub, I could try moving all my old projects into one archive repo. This sounds ugly – my first thought was doing it via submodules – though Eelco had the good idea of using headless branches for each project. Unfortunately this still strikes me as a hack.
So I fear I may need to host my old repos on another server. There are lots of other supplies with better private repository pricing, or I might just setup the repos on my own server. Thoughts?
December 15th, 2011 at 3:10 pm
For old git projects that do not require collaboration I take them off Github, zip them and back them up (Dropbox et all). I find Github is only necessary if you are doing active collaboration for a project. I have some projects that I update regularity that are not on Github at all.
January 6th, 2012 at 3:46 am
[...] had a good suggestion in response to my complaint that private repos on GitHub were too expensive, which was download old [...]
January 31st, 2012 at 4:00 pm
This is the exact reason I’m not using github for any private repos. I really wish I could, but I’ve got 28 repos and counting. For the same reasons as you, I’d prefer to just keep them all online, but don’t want to pay 100/month for it.
I suggest that you look into a cheap Dreamhost shared account (typically $100/year, but occassionally you can nab 1 year for $10 on holiday specials). They have a built-in subversion tool, which allows you to create “unlimited” repositories. Much cheaper than github, although you could also just get a plan with dreamhost to simple host your “archived” repositories.