Ever wondered what would happen if your GitHub account got locked, or a repo got deleted by mistake? If GitHub is the only place your code lives, that's a real risk.
We have a lot of public repos under One Scales, and I wanted an easy way to back them all up regularly. Cloning each one by hand and zipping it up gets old fast, especially with more than a few repos. So we built GitHub Backup Repo, an Apify app that downloads your public repos as ZIP files in a few seconds.
In this article I'll show you how to use it, step by step. If you prefer video, here's the full walkthrough on YouTube.
How to back up your repos
- Open the app on Apify. Go to apify.com and register a free account. Search for "GitHub Backup Repo" or "One Scales," or go straight to the app page. Click Try for free.
- Add your repo URLs. On the Input tab, add the URLs of the public repos you want to back up. Click Add for one at a time, or Bulk Add to paste them row by row. You can do one, a few, or a hundred or more. You can also pass them in programmatically.
- Run it. Click Save & Start and wait a few seconds. When you see "Actor succeeded," it's done. The app downloads all the code from each repo's main branch.
- Download your backup. Scroll down to the results. You get one row per repo, plus one ZIP file with all the repos together. Go to the Download Links column to download repos one by one or the combined ZIP. Double-click the file and it unzips.
- Check and export the results. Each row also shows how many files are inside the repo and the total size. To save the list, click Export and download it as JSON, CSV, or any other format Apify supports.
How to automate your backups
A one-time backup is good. A backup that runs by itself is better.
Schedule it. Click Schedule Actor, pick how often you want it to run, set the time, and click Create. We back up our One Scales repos once a month.
Save it to Google Drive. Add an integration so each scheduled run uploads its ZIP to Google Drive. After that, everything is saved and backed up automatically.
Connect it to your own tools. Click the API tab to get your API key and endpoint details. From there you can call the app from your own code, from make.com, or even from your AI through the MCP configurator.
Try it out
Setup takes about a minute, and each run takes a few seconds. You can try GitHub Backup Repo for free on Apify.
If you have any questions about how it works, or suggestions for new features, just let us know. Much appreciated.
