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Comment by jayd16 | Hacker News Reader

Hmm backups seems like an important one.

“Guys, we need to postpone our beta launch! We need another week to implement a backup strategy with point in time recovery!”

You don’t need backups until you have customers.

So go live without testing the backup in the beta at all?

Yes! Why build a backup process before you know you have data worth backing up.

Why go live if you don't have a reasonable expectation of users?

Worrying about HA when you don't have customers that need it is one thing, but I wouldn't want to be in a place where I have to put a banner on the website asking users to please make a new account because we had an oopsie.

To be fair, there's a big difference between "we do periodic backups" and "we can restore to any millisecond since product launch.

Sure, but it seemed to be that any backups at all were being called too frivolous.

The data recovery process needs to be validated too, preferably before customer data actually needs to be recovered.

And also incredibly trivial to fix. Most VPS providers include their own backup services, and for the rest there's rsnapshot and some other cheaper VPS somewhere else to keep it "off site."

Too many have forgotten what it means to administrate a single system. You can do a lot with very simple tooling.

Yes, and is super easy.

I do like this: cron to run the backup and then rsync to https://www.rsync.net, then an after script that check it was run and post to my telegram the analysis.

That is.

Another good option is Restic, since snapshots let you go back in time. That is useful in case you accidentally delete/break something and you're not quite fast enough to restore from backup before the next cron runs.

Litestream [1] is quick to set up and has point in time backup to the second.

- [1] https://litestream.io

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