I’m not sure why this isn’t really covered simply in one place but here it goes…

Using just the cli you can do the following:

FYI: the git archive command is not the thing we want, that is more for prepping code for deployment to a site…

What we really want is to offline or backup the repo

The idea is:

  • git clone --mirror <repository_url>

    • which results in a dir <repository_url>.git/

  • cd <repository_url>.git/

  • git bundle create ../<repository_name>.bundle --all

    • which makes a single file which can be cloned from later

  • zstd --compress --progress --threads=0 --rm <repository_name>.bundle

    • will compress it in place (deleting the uncompressed original)

Then to get it all back you reverse the process

  • zstd --decompress --progress --threads=0 --rm <repository_name>.bundle.zst

    • decompress the file

  • git clone /path/to/<repository_name>.bundle /path/to/restored_repo

and that should be it…

In practice, when I do this all the branches are remote still


  master

* newfeature

  remotes/origin/20190108-release

  remotes/origin/20220509-release

  remotes/origin/406-thing

but the remote is actually the bundle


ivan@srv:/ssd/git_repo_restored$ git remote -v

origin  /ssd/git_rep.bundle (fetch)

origin  /ssd/git_rep.bundle (push)