Backups and recovery

Backups you can actually restore: restic, retention, monitoring, restore drills and runbooks for a single VPS.

How to write a restore runbook you can follow at 3 a.m.

A fill-in restore runbook template for one VPS covering who does what, the order of steps, RTO and RPO in plain words, and how to drill it until it works.

Backups and recovery · 9 min read

When a restore succeeds and hands you the wrong data

Restores that exit 0 can return old, empty or partial data. Learn six ways it happens and how to check row counts and freshness so a restore proves itself.

Backups and recovery · 10 min read

restic forget and prune: how the keep flags decide

How restic forget --keep-daily, --keep-weekly and --keep-monthly combine, what prune really deletes, and how to pick a policy and test it with --dry-run.

Backups and recovery · 9 min read

A restic backup recipe for SQLite and Postgres on one VPS

Back up a small server with restic without corrupt databases, using SQLite online backup, pg_dump with roles, aborts on bad dumps and a restore test.

Backups and recovery · 9 min read

Monitoring backups so that silence never means success

Set up dead-man's-switch pings, exit-code handling, snapshot age checks and failure alerts for a restic backup, so a job that stops running gets noticed.

Backups and recovery · 8 min read

I destroyed my server on purpose and timed the recovery

Script a disaster-recovery drill for one VPS. Destroy the server, rebuild from restic, check the data, and see timings and five failures it found.

Backups and recovery · 9 min read

The 3-2-1 backup rule applied to a single VPS

Translate 3-2-1 backups to one small server. See what counts as a copy, where the offsite one goes, how object storage compares with SFTP, and what it costs.