FAQs

How do I create a GitHub personal access token?

You can create a new personal access token by following the steps mentioned here: Creating a personal access token. If you don't want to rotate the tokens after expiry, select the (Classic) option while creating the token and set expiration to Never.

More details can be found here: https://github.com/AkashRajpurohit/git-sync/wiki/Generating-Credentials#github

How do I create a GitLab personal access token?

Follow the guide mentioned here: Creating a personal access token. And ensure that the access token have required read permissions in order to fetch your public/private projects.

More details can be found here: https://github.com/AkashRajpurohit/git-sync/wiki/Generating-Credentials#gitlab

How do I restore from the backups?

The backups generated by git-sync are essentially bare clones of your repositories. To restore a repository, you can simply clone it from the backup directory. For example:

git clone /path/to/backup/repo.git

I have multiple accounts, some from GitHub and some from GitLab, what should I do?

Since git-sync follows a config driven approach, you can essentially create multiple yaml files, let's say github-account1.yaml and gitlab-account2.yaml and add the necessary information accordingly in these files. Post that, you can simply run git-sync by passing --config path/to/config flag.

Read more about the Flags here: https://github.com/AkashRajpurohit/git-sync/wiki/Commands-and-Flags#flags

Does git-sync collect any data?

git-sync collects anonymous usage telemetry to help understand which platforms and features are popular. No PII, repository names, or tokens are ever collected — only aggregate counts and metadata like platform, OS, architecture, and sync success/failure counts. Telemetry is enabled by default and can be disabled by setting telemetry.enabled: false in your config or by setting the GIT_SYNC_NO_TELEMETRY=1 environment variable.

More details can be found here: https://github.com/AkashRajpurohit/git-sync/wiki/Telemetry

What does the issue backup feature do?

When include_issues is set to true, git-sync will backup all issues from your repositories as JSON and Markdown files. Issues are saved to <backup_dir>/<owner>/<repo>/issues/ with individual files per issue, preserving titles, descriptions, labels, comments, and metadata. An index.json is also maintained for quick lookups. This feature currently supports GitHub and GitLab.