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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

Paying someone $2000 to set that up once should result in the costs being recovered in what, 18 months?

If you’re running Postgres locally you can turn off the TCP/IP part; nothing more to audit there.

SSH based copying of backups to a remote server is simple.

If not accessible via network, you can stay on whatever version of Postgres you want.

I’ve heard these arguments since AWS launched, and all that time I’ve been running Postgres (since 2004 actually) and have never encountered all these phantom issues that are claimed as being expensive or extremely difficult.

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I guess my non-management / non-business side is show here, but how can it be that much?? I still remember I designed a fairly simple cron job that took database backups when I was a junior developer.

It gets even easier now that you have cheap s3 - just upload the dump to s3 every day and set the s3 deletion policy to whatever is feasible for you.

How much were you paid as a jr developer, and how long did it take you to set up? Then round up to mid-level developer, and add in hardware and software costs.

That's a deflection. The question isn't about a developer's salary; it's about the fundamental difference between a one-time investment and a permanent cost.

Either way: 1 day of a mid-level developer in the majority of the world (basically: anywhere except Zurich, NYC or SF) is between €208 and €291. (Yearly salary of €50-€70k)

A junior developer's time for setup and the cost of hardware is practically a one-off expense. It's a few days of work at most.

The alternative you're advocating for (a recurring SaaS fee) is a permanent rent trap. That money is gone forever, with no asset or investment to show for it. Over a few years, you'll have spent tens of thousands of dollars for nothing. The real cost is not what you pay a developer; it's what you lose by never owning your tools.

> The alternative you're advocating for

Not sure where I advocated for that. Could you point it out please?

I am not an expert here but I am currently researching for a planned project.

For backups, including Postgres, I was planning on paying Veeam ~$500 a year for a software license to backup the active node and Postgres database to s3/r2. Standby node would be getting streaming updates via logical replication.

There are free options as well but I didn’t want to cheap out on the backups.

It looks pretty turnkey. I am a software engineer not a sysadmin though. Still just theory as well as I haven’t built it out yet

Taking database backups is relatively simple. What differentiates a good solution is the ease of restoring from a backup. This includes the certainty that the restored state would be a correct point-in-time state from the past, not an amalgamation of several such states.

$2k? That’s a $100k project for a medium size Corp

hmm where did you get the numbers?

(what's "medium-size corp" and how did you come up with $100k ?)

I’m assuming he’s talking about the corporate team of DBA’s that will spend weeks discussing the best way to copy a bunch of SQL files to S3

$200 does seem too low. $100k seems waaay too high. That sounds like an AWS talking point.

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