Let’s face it. Backups are the dental floss of the SaaS world. Everyone agrees they’re important, but few take them seriously—until it hurts. One fateful evening, a client's production database was nuked thanks to a rogue deploy script. Good times. Except not.
So, we finally said: enough.
We rolled up our dev sleeves and built a real, battle-tested backup strategy for our SaaS apps. Here's how you can too.
If you're SSH-ing into your server and running pg_dump manually, congratulations—you’re living in 2008. Manual backups are error-prone, forgettable, and almost never tested. And guess what? Your future self will hate you.
We went with Restic. It's fast, encrypted by default, and plays well with cron or systemd timers. Need to back up PostgreSQL? Pipe it through pg_dump and send it to Restic.
For example:
PGPASSWORD=yourpassword pg_dump -U youruser yourdb | restic backup --stdin --stdin-filename db.sql
We use systemd timers (on Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows servers) to run backups regularly. Daily full, hourly incrementals. Your mileage may vary.
Don’t forget to log output somewhere useful. Because one day, you will need to know why a backup failed.
You’re backing up user data. Encrypt it. We use Restic’s built-in encryption. Bonus: encryption at rest = fewer GDPR nightmares.
Use cloud storage. We like Backblaze B2 and AWS S3. Even better—rotate between two. One for frequent access, one for cold storage.
Example setup:
export B2_ACCOUNT_ID=...
export B2_ACCOUNT_KEY=...
restic -r b2:bucketname:/path backup /data
Restoring from a backup isn’t the time to learn how to restore from a backup. Do it monthly. Create a staging environment and go through the motions.
Command to restore with Restic:
restic restore latest --target /tmp/restore-test
Hook your backup jobs into your monitoring stack. We use Prometheus + Grafana. Even a Slack alert on failure is better than silence.
One of our US-based clients (fintech SaaS) had a massive issue: an intern dropped the prod database. Luckily, our automated backup strategy kicked in. Within 17 minutes, we fully restored the system using the backup stored on Backblaze B2. No data loss. No reputational damage.
Ask any SaaS founder who’s lost production data if they regret not automating backups. They’ll either tear up or lie.
Automating SaaS backups won’t win you design awards. But it might save your reputation—and your business.
For those starting from scratch, our team also helps with Web MVP Development where automated backups are part of the default setup.
