For Project Elara we are deeply concerned that someone might delete our repositories (oh no!) or even delete our [Codeberg organization](https://codeberg.org/elaraproject/), which would cause permanent and irreversible loss of data (please no!). This can happen in at least two ways: - Accidental deletion if somehow an admin accidentally presses the delete button and then absentmindedly enters the confirmation dialog - Deliberate deletion: if somehow the organization becomes out of our control and someone does it against our will It is not enough to put up an organizational policy that says "do not _ever_ delete the org"; we need some backup system in place to mirror all of our repositories[^1]. And not just our repositories - this includes everything on our codeberg, including issues, PRs, releases, etc. since a lot of our collaboration happens on there too. We currently do not have the infrastructure to do so ourselves. However, we must implement this at some point, because this is a serious issue. > **Update:** a promising project archival system (that archives snapshots of our websites, repos, etc.) is [Webrecorder](https://webrecorder.net/archivewebpage/), which is built on the [`pywb`](https://pywb.readthedocs.io/en/latest/manual/usage.html) library. If we can get it set up, all weblinks in the project should provide an alternate link to the latest backed-up version in Webrecorder to avoid broken links (although it should also have some sort of badge saying "this page was archived at `YYYY-MM-DD`, the most recent version of the site can be found at `https://INSERT_SOME_URL`") [^1]: By this, we mean open-source mirrors, like those at colleges and other institutions. We do *not* mean places like GitHub, which are proprietary. We *may* be willing to use self-hosted GitLab as a mirror.