Gitlab repositories disappeared

HI,
I have lost access to all my projects (since Friday July 22) created under a group that suddenly disappeared without any action. Now all my projects path doesn’t work (404 project doesn’t exist) can you tell me what is the problem and of there is any way to recover them please ? I contacted the support but they didn’t answer yet

Thanks in advance !

Hi @zahia_ameziani

Sorry to hear that! I’ve got a couple of questions:

• is this on a Self Hosted instance or in GitLab SaaS?
• were you the owner of those groups and projects? Because if you were not and you were only granted access to those projects, maybe your access got removed form a maintainer or the owner and if those projects and groups were private you wouldn’t be able to see them now

Hi,
To answer your questions :

• It’s in Gitlab SaaS
• Yes, i own the group and i didn’t do any manipulate before.

Looks relevant to 15.2 release!

Yup, was thinking the same

Maybe it’s worth getting someone from the GitLab Team involved to take a look

I’m waiting for Gitlab Support answear

Hi @zahia_ameziani Did you get any feedback from the GitLab Support Team?

Hi, Yes they told me that one of my team group deleted the group by accident and they can’t do anything since i am a free user

Ah, I’m so sorry to hear that

Do you know any solution to have a synchronous backup for gitlab repositories to avoid this kind of situation in the future ?

One thing that comes to mind is maybe setting up a repository mirror? Pushing from your “main” repository to a “backup” repository on another group maybe?

I have a NAS Synology, i don’t know if there is any way to configure it with gitlab

That might work as a backup, but for the whole GitLab instance if you were using self hosted and not SaaS. With SaaS the backups are handled my GitLab itself.

With repository mirroring you’d have a backup of only the repositories you choose to, backing them up into what is effectively a new repo.

No, i’m using Gitlab SaaS (no backup for free users).
I think i’m taking your slution to make a repository mirroring.
Thanks for your help !!!

No worries I hope that works for you

You can run your own install of Gitlab on Synology and have full control over backups/restore. Or alternatively run a VM with Gitlab installed on it.

So you could then push from Gitlab SaaS to your own Gitlab installation, or you can even push it to somewhere else, like Github. That way it’s totally separate. Mirroring on the same server location, be it Gitlab SaaS or your own Gitlab install wouldn’t make much sense. You might even have the ability to mirror to both places, so your own Gitlab and Github so that it exists in even more places! I actually mirror to one location, haven’t tried multiple so not sure if it’s possible.

I actually never used repository mirroring myself so that’s new for me too, and it actually is a pretty clever idea Thanks a lot!

It’s pretty cool. Generally when you then push a commit to it, that automatically gets pushed over via the mirror. That said, if I do a few commits almost immediately after each other, there will be a certain delay until the next changes get pushed over, but it’s maybe something like 10 - 30 mins max.

Pretty sweet indeed Though in our self-hosted solution, I setup a full backup off site so we won’t have these kind of problems ()

You could also grab the files under /var/opt/gitlab/backups and send these to a secondary location. I actually backup my Gitlab Server using Active Backup on Synology, so I configure it to grab pretty much all of my server. But you could concentrate that to /etc/gitlab, /opt/gitlab, /var/opt/gitlab and any other paths.

That way, I also have the ability to completely restore the server, as well as all the user accounts, etc, etc.