Q. does
download_organization_repos“lock_repositories” before migration?I am not 100% sure what locking a repo does, but I saw the term in the GitHub docs as recommended: Exporting migration data from GitHub.com.
We use the default value of false see the docs Organization migrations - GitHub Docs and our code https://github.com/ropensci-org/gitcellar/blob/2bc062989eba0b8b1d22a671620042ce72ea149c/R/repo.R#L15 If you think we should surface the arguments, feel free to open an issue (or a PR 
) with the feature request. However I don’t think that’s what you want, I think only people who actually want to migrate their repo, not back it up using the migration archive, need that. If you lock a repo for instance there’s no write access to it.
The
gitcellarpackage describes exactly what I am wanting to achieve for our organization (downloading files, git history and metadata (including issues/PRs)). To confirm, the “downloading an archive” viagitceller; does this still keep the Github.com repo as is. Meaning, I want to avoid actually moving/migrating the repo. Or in other words, I want to avoid doing a “cut and paste” and rather have a “copy and paste” (sorry for the awkward question, my fear is doing something destructive to our repo)
We back up all our repos weekly and they stay as they are. However I’d recommend creating an organization with a few toy repos in it (with a few files in each, a few issues, a few PRs), to experiment, so that you can see what happens and feel safer.
One use case was reported on this forum.