On: Dear GitHub

[bsder]

Wait, are you telling me that every git repository isn't a full copy of the codebase that you could recover from?

Really? I find that hard to believe, but it makes me glad I use Mercurial if that's the case.

[neandrake → bsder]

Git repositories do have a full copy of the codebase (unless using some large-file management, same issue with largefiles extension for hg).

But gitlab/github are more than just git repositories -- issue tracking, discussions, wiki, etc. One version control which includes most of this as part of the repository is fossil, http://fossil-scm.org