Nowadays, intellectual property is a very important aspect of companies. Even more than ever. Therefore, we must protect it at all costs. Of course, all contracts written by a team of lawyers are important, but this is only one side of the coin. In the IT world, the software is such intellectual property. Millions of lines of code that make our world look the way it looks. We cannot afford to lose this value!
What is Backup?
It is said that there are two groups of people – those who do backups and those who will. We should be smart and belong to this first group. When something goes wrong and we lose our data, we should have a copy that is easy to restore and get your business back up and running. Crashes or hacking attacks are not unusual these days, so we should pay more attention to this aspect. Let’s focus on our code and the use of the Git version control system. Be aware that Git is not a backup software by itself. What to do then?
How it Can be Done Manually?
Someone may say that GitHub backup is sufficient. And we will say that it is not, because ransomware attacks hit such websites regularly. In that case, we can do the backup ourselves, and we often do that, but it’s a very dangerous game. Using the Git functionality, we can create our own scripts that will create backups, but it requires a lot of manual work and constant monitoring and updating of these scripts. For this, we also need to invest in some disk space where such backups will be stored. In practice, over time, this grows to absurd dimensions, time-consuming procedures, and often only one person knows what is really going on there and how to maintain it. It’s not a smart way.
Third Party Backup Software
External services can come to our rescue. They can be open-source or commercial projects. The important thing is that it is software specifically developed by an external company and then used by other companies in their own projects. Payment systems are a good example here. We can build our own online store, but instead of creating our own payment module, it is easier and faster (and often cheaper) to use ready-made external solutions.
Instead of building and maintaining your own scripts, it is worth using such external providers. One of them is GitProtect, which is the third party Git backup software. The benefits of using this system are primarily the automation of the backup process, anytime-anywhere access through the web application, encryption of our property – our code, and data long-term retention. And that’s not all of the benefits! Thanks to this, we do not have to waste time and costs on building our own system or creating scripts manually. We can and should focus on developing our business, leaving the subject of security and backup to the experts.