Probably just downloaded the repo as a zip instead of cloning it through git.

FWIW, this can actually be a valid strategy, purely because a DMCA takedown will affect forks but not reuploads. Basically, if a DMCA takedown nukes a project, it also nukes any forked projects. But if you downloaded the .zip and reuploaded it, you won’t be affected by the DMCA takedown because it’s not considered a fork of the original project.

It’s a dumb workaround, but it oddly may have helped save a lot of the code simply because offline backups can’t get touched by DMCA or a nuked project.