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Comment by csydas | Hacker News Reader

i saw your now dead comment about how no one you interviewed had an answer…

just it’s surprising to me that devops folk aren’t in an org that has backup software, cause this kind of testing is standard load out for most backup softwares, and they even solve the space and isolation issue with various instant restore / publishing capabilities where data from the backup is mounted directly to some staging server with postgres or whatever installed in an isolated area

not trying to knock the idea you are correct most ppl don’t test their backups, but it’s a bit strange no one you talked to used any of the most common backup softwares

definitely in favor of free solutions as backup software field is awful like many ent tech fields, but like the workflows do exist

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One person I talked to had Veeam SureBackup running and still built a separate check for the database. As I know SureBackup proved the VM boots, but it doesn't know or care if your orders table has the right row count, or if a sequence is broken. That needs a tool that actually understand the specific platform or data, like Postgres, not only the underlying VM. Also a lot of people I talked to were never use Veeam or Commvault, since they run Postgres on RDS, Supabase, or a simple VM. And even where the tooling exists, it's usually a separate infra tam running it, not the people who actually own this one database, so it never gets wired up for this specific check anyway. This tool is more for people whose stack never had such a thing, or it's there and nobody's actually using it for this.

aha that’s sort of what i mean though — your concept is two parts: isolated restore and bespoke tests

the isolation part is something that is more difficult due to space and resource constraints, and a lot of backup apps handle that but expect the user to handle the bespoke testing part

your tool covers both but expects the user to provide both which isn’t always feasible for the application teams (not impossible but lot of red tape to request resources and a lot of resistance if the company already has recovery verification tooling)

if i were you i would refocus your pitch on making it work as part of those backup software workflows, “tell your backup team about this test suite and include it in their recovery verification workflows” and i’m sure you’ll get a lot of attention

most of the dba’s probably have a backup and recovery verification solution at their company with the isolation and resources but they don’t have the bespoke application testing

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