Additional context: a GitHub employee addresses why they didn't do a backup restore in this tweet:
> Yup, all watchers go when you go private and a bunch of notification settings etc. We've tried re-staring projects in the past etc but that ends up breaking lots of peoples notification settings. It's something we should make more reversible but hard for reasons <waveshand>
> It's the reason we display this when you try to do it. But a better fix would be for us to make it more easily reversible in the future.
> Yup, all watchers go when you go private and a bunch of notification settings etc. We've tried re-staring projects in the past etc but that ends up breaking lots of peoples notification settings. It's something we should make more reversible but hard for reasons <waveshand>
> It's the reason we display this when you try to do it. But a better fix would be for us to make it more easily reversible in the future.
https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/149333649025189478...