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I am talking about this:
"SourceForge.net maintains a geographically-distributed network of mirror servers, which receive copies of the files and dispense them to users."

So, does github has the same automatically mirrored backup of our projects and files? I am having big trouble trying to find that information.

Aquarius Power
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Yes, it is called DGit for Distributed Git:

As many readers already know, Git itself is distributed—any copy of a Git repository contains every file, branch, and commit in the project’s entire history.
DGit uses this property of Git to keep three copies of every repository, on three different servers. The design of DGit keeps repositories fully available without interruption even if one of those servers goes down.

http://githubengineering.com/images/introducing-dgit/fileservers.png

DGit automatically selects the servers to host each repository, keeps those replicas in sync, and picks the best server to handle each incoming read request. Writes are synchronously streamed to all three replicas and are only committed if at least two replicas confirm success.

GitHub now stores repositories in a cluster called github-dfs—dfs is short for “DGit file server.” The repositories are stored on local disks on these file servers and are served up by Git and libgit2. The clients of this cluster include the web front end and the proxies that speak to users’ Git clients.

http://githubengineering.com/images/introducing-dgit/architecture.png

Community
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VonC
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  • Very interesting, it makes we feel there are hundreds of servers, but unfortunately it doesnt show us a picture of how globally spread they are. I understand that, considering ppl all over the world get projects fast from github, that they are probably well spread. – Aquarius Power Jun 16 '16 at 08:11
  • @AquariusPower I suspect this is for security reason, to limit the knowledge of potention attack vector. – VonC Jun 16 '16 at 08:13
  • oh... well... SourceForge doesnt seem to care then... anyway, long ago when I chose sf.net, one of the big reasons were the mirrors. So, may be GitHub is even more safe than sf.net now... good! thx! – Aquarius Power Jun 16 '16 at 08:17
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Yes in a way. Git is a distributed source control system. But only if others are using the repository. Some projects will have hundreds of offsite replications. Others sadly very few.

But these off site copies are not available to you directly

Mike
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  • Unfortunately this is more about hope :)... but... I found about [GitTorrent](https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon/blob/master/Encyclopedia/Ideas/Gittorrent.md) too. I am not sure yet if this is really happening tho. And anyway, how much terabytes each user should have to help on it? what each user would host then? and... are the many precompiled libraries really necessary to be stored? may be only all the real source code should suffice to lower disk space usage :) – Aquarius Power Jun 16 '16 at 08:08