Disaster Recovery and Backups

Short summary

A practical guide to disaster recovery for early-stage SaaS products, focusing on defining RPO and RTO targets before choosing tooling. It contrasts logical backups (pg_dump) with physical backups using WAL archiving for point-in-time recovery, and includes a working bash script for automated pg_dump to S3. The core message: pick recovery targets based on business impact, automate backups to meet them, and rehearse restores before you need them.

• •Define RPO and RTO from business impact before selecting backup tooling
• •Logical backups (pg_dump) are portable but slow to restore; physical backups with WAL archiving enable PITR
• •Automate, upload to S3, and test restores — don't wait for a real incident to find gaps

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