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Mirroring git repos with force push protection?
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this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
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Mirroring is exactly that: a copy
If the thing you are mirroring does something you don't like, you can't stop. Literally imagine standing in front of a mirror and trying to stop the reflection from doing something you don't like. Not happening.
The thing about git is that it keeps all history, even in a force push situation, unless they actively clear previous history, which is... difficult.
What you can do is lag proxy whatever the main branch is to catch it in time, or just keep revisions of your mirror that you script and tag yourself. It's like a daily backup you can go back and look into.
It's going to waste a ton of space and time, but it would effectively create a stop-loss on someone nuking history, which generally is just not a thing that people do because it's entirely stupid.
Great answer on the whole, but worth noting that both Git’s standard CLI client and most hosted git services do run periodic GC to prune dangling commits.
I second the suggestion to take periodic snapshots of your mirror. Because the majority of file contents will not be changing over time, you can make these snapshots very disk-space efficient by taking binary diffs of the tar’d repo using rdiff or the like.
True, I can do that with btrfs snapshots