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Comment by sahilagarwal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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