Today we are excited to announce that BackHub is now available on GitHub Marketplace. It’s an all new version of BackHub that comes with a new feature called “Backup Snapshots” and is built as a GitHub App for a more solid integration, allowing granular, read only permissions in order to easily create backups of your repositories.
Read on for more details or start right away to use the new BackHub.
BackHub on GitHub Marketplace
Earlier this year GitHub introduced GitHub Marketplace. This is a platform to find integrations and put them to work within minutes in order to help you evolve and customize your workflow. This was great news, because for us as integrators it means we can spend more time on core functionality of our apps rather than wasting time building payment integrations that don’t really add value for our users.
Over the last couple of months we have been working in close collaboration with GitHub to integrate our service with GitHub Marketplace. We’ve received lots of support from GitHub along the way.
The great thing with BackHub on GitHub Marketplace is that you don’t have to set up a new billing account with us. You can simply use your GitHub account to purchase a plan for BackHub. Besides that, all our plans on GitHub Marketplace come with a 14 day free trial.
BackHub on GitHub Marketplace is not just BackHub on a different distribution channel. It’s newly built software that comes with additional features and is set up on a whole new infrastructure for an even more robust and reliable service.
New feature: Backup Snapshots
With BackHub on GitHub Marketplace we are introducing Backup Snapshots. It’s basically a time machine for all your repositories including metadata associated with it, such as issues and pull requests.
BackHub creates daily snapshots and keeps them for the last 30 days. That means you can rollback to a previous state of your repository from any of the past 30 days. This can be important when the history of a repository has been changed with git-reset or git-rebase and data has been lost due to a forced push.
Beyond that, since metadata (e.g., issues) are not part of the repository itself and are therefore not being versioned, important data can easily be lost. With Backup Snapshots you can recover any metadata included in the backup from any of the past 30 days.
This has been one of the most requested features to date. It adds an extra layer of security to your backup strategy.
Built as GitHub App
Together with the Marketplace, GitHub has also introduced GitHub Apps (formerly Integrations). They have granular permissions, which allows us to ask only for those permissions we need to create backups for you. We have separated the backup service from the restore utility (to be released soon) in order to be able to limit our acccess to read-only permissions on your repositories while creating backups and only asking for write permission if a repository needs to be restored.
GitHub Apps are also able to take actions themselves directly through the API. That means no user impersonation is required, which is critical in case roles in your organization change. (For example, when an organization admin has created the account and is no longer admin of that organization.) In the past, backups couldn’t be updated and another admin was required to login. However,the new BackHub GitHub App operates independently to avoid any interruption of service.
You can install BackHub on an organization or user account, then give access to the repositories of your choice. If you give access to all repositories, BackHub will create backups of all current and future repositories in your GitHub account. If you prefer to backup only select repositories, simply limit access to those you want to backup during the installation process.
If you have questions or thoughts on our new product or face any issues using it, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Daniel Heitz">
