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Comment by SnowingXIV | Hacker News Reader

> Free daily backups with point-in-time recovery Your data is critical.

> That’s why we ensure it’s backed up every day. Restore data to any point within the previous seven days.

Seems very similar to Heroku's model at that price. Which is actually pretty fair. I'm so happy to see DO doing this because there is always part of me worried that if Heroku were to go out of business, change their pricing model, start dipping in reliability that I'd be stuck spending a bunch more hours on dev ops instead of focusing on development.

More quality competition is great to keep Heroku on their toes (though I've had nothing but love for them).

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They state (1) free daily backups and (2) restore to any datapoint within the previous seven days.

But if they only create a backup once a day i can only restore to any point in time before the last full backup. Did they mean the constantly backup the postgres WAL files so effectively you have backups only a few minutes old?

If they didn't back up the WAL files, point in time recovery wouldn't work at all (not even beetween full backups).

They are probably doing log shipping or even streaming replication:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/warm-standby.html

Sending all changes to another machine and they can be applied in the event of a failure of the primary node. The backup process allows you to truncate the logs up to the point of the backups.

Well, the tooling to do that is available open source [1][2][3]. Barman[1] is more suitable for on-premises, while wal-e[2] and wal-g[3] are more suitable for the cloud. The wal-e[2] actually comes from Heroku.

[1] https://www.pgbarman.org/

[2] https://github.com/wal-e/wal-e

[3] https://github.com/wal-g/wal-g

I highly recommend https://aiven.io/ for another alternative. They have some unique features like local SSDs, cross-cloud and cross-region replication and migration, VPC support and integrating services together.

ElephantSQL is apparently very good: https://www.elephantsql.com/plans.html

Heroku is part of Salesforce, doesn't seem like much risk of them going out of business.

There is always a risk of Salesforce shutting them down, though. Not that I think it's likely, but I wouldn't assume that having a large parent company means they will be around forever.

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