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w8whut12/09/20242 repliesview on HN

daily test restore is infeasible for anything but toy projects. You should periodically test your restore procedures, but its incredibly costly and time consuming for sizeable platforms. Its just not that easy to restore a 10+TB backup for example, and thats a _tiny_ backup size for a b2c product.

they can easily go into the hundreds of TB, depending on your platform.

and i might add: i vividly remember gitlabs article how they have had automated backups and test restores for years, but when they actually needed them... it turned out some data wasn't part of it after all. just because youre testing your restore procedure doesnt mean you've actually accomplished anything.


Replies

KingOfCoders12/10/2024

Have two backups, the most recent data and everything else. Archive data to different databases, e.g. only have the most recent 6 months in a production OLTP database.

"daily test restore is infeasible for anything but toy projects. "

It probably depends on what you call "toy" project. If you work for Google, yes I think everything is a toy project, and you're right. I only worked for ~$200M ARR/1M DAU businesses and restoring was no problem. From your point working for a FAANG business it's a toy project I can see that. But there are many more "toy projects" of this kind than FAANG companies.

"10+TB backup for example, and thats a _tiny_ backup size for a b2c product."

Sure.

rodgerd12/09/2024

> but its incredibly costly and time consuming for sizeable platforms.

If your restores are too time consuming to test regularly, they sure as shit aren't going to be useful in a disaster.

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