It's not about backups.
It's about an organization that has the tendency to centralization of content. Only a few/selected few have access to the material.
Like per example, Terrasync. If terrasync were to fail, or a situation happens, then no 2nd repository to restore from exits. SVN IS CENTRALIZED. Same for FGADDon.
In the case of the mapserver, they first claim hardware issue, then someone (Hooray) mentioned that a previous collaborator is unwilling to share the sources. God Knows what's true when Hooray speaks.
But again, the landclasses (AKA mapserver) where centralized as in no-one else having a copy of the full data-set repository (apparently).
You don't need backups when you are distributed (think git). If you need to, any collaborators' clone is a full copy of the complete content.
That's reason number 3 I alleged when I suggested the cores to drop FGADDon for FGMEMBERS. I told them, it is centralized ! (yikeS!). And they took an attitude that meant: we are not interested in distributed (in the form of: we dont want to encourage people forking away)
So again, I don't see this as a problem of backups. But a problem of a proper distribution of content.
FGMEMBERS and FGMEMBERS-TERRAGIT partly solve that problem.
At least V0 is already distributed in FGMEMBERS-TERRAGIT, and people could fork/clone/and develop on GPL license terms.
https://github.com/FGMEMBERS-TERRAGIT?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=v0What about cs_landclasses?