trog 4 hours ago

My VPS provider just lets me take image snapshots of the whole machine so I can roll back to a point in time. It's a little slower and less flexible than application or component level but overall I don't even think about backup and restore now because I know it's handled there.

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dewey 5 hours ago

Providing robust restoring and backup systems for a system that allows to run any kind of workload is almost impossible. You'd have to provide database backups for all versions of all databases, correct file backup for the volumes etc.

It feels much more dangerous to have such a system instead in place and provide false sense of security. Users know best what kind of data they need to backup, where they want to back it up, if it needs to be encrypted or not, if it needs to be daily or weekly etc.

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  • sgarland 4 hours ago

    ZFS. Snapshot the entire filesystem, ship it off somewhere. Done. At worst, Postgres is slow to startup from the snapshot because it thinks it’s recovering from a crash.

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    • GauntletWizard 4 hours ago

      Postgres is recovering from a crash if it's reading from a ZFS snapshot. It probably did have several of it's database writes succeed that it wasn't certain of, and others fail that it also wasn't certain of, and those might not have been "in order". That's why WAL files exist, and it needs to fully replay them.

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Aeolun 5 hours ago

None of my hobby projects across 15 years or so have ever needed backups or restoring. I can agree it would be nice to have, but it’s a far cry from necessary.

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