I can point you in the way of our current approach to GH backups.

(BTW, we have this public project, gh-backup; almost two years without maintenance.
Either we take it up, or we discontinue it — and make that clear on the project page.)

Having looked at the backups, they are indeed incomplete when it comes to non-git data:

• we only have the latest 30 issues per repo (corresponding to the default pagination of the github API)
• we only capture data about issues, nothing about the comments made on the issues (where most of the value actually resides)

It would probably be useful to take a thorough review of the tool we use for the backup, and in particular compare it with the many data that github exposes via its API:
https://developer.github.com/v3/

I wonder, don't we have the issues/comments through pheme?

we have a subset of the data on issue and comments via pheme; but pheme is not a backup system and is not built for long-term reliability.

The User Migration API announced recently seems helpful.

Could the systems team please clarify for the staff the current situation wrt github backups, and say something about plans for ongoing improvements. I thought i heard last week that we have backups of most of the data, but not in an accessible form. It sounds like we should be working on that as a pretty high priority, given that much of our institutional knowledge is affected.

Hi @r12a, W3C Systeam already has backups of our GitHub data in place. We will communicate on this soon.