A Git outage rarely looks dramatic at first. Someone cannot push during a release, a repository disappears from an organization, an admin account is locked, or a provider status page starts turning yellow while CI is waiting for a ref it cannot fetch.
The first answer is usually, "We all have local clones." That is true, and it helps, but a developer's laptop is a weak recovery plan. It may not have every branch, every tag, Git LFS objects, old maintenance refs, or the clean credentials needed to push a usable copy somewhere else. During an incident, those details stop being theoretical.
If the goal is recovery, the backup needs to be a remote repository the team can inspect, clone, and promote when the primary Git host is unavailable.
What a useful repository backup should preserve
For Git repositories, the basic primitive is still simple:
