[hodgesrm]

I work for a company that supports ClickHouse. Our focus is analytic systems, which tend to run large compared to OLTP systems.

* Sharding is part of schema design for any analytic app whose data exceeds the capacity of a single host. This is very common for use cases like web analytics, observability, network management, intrusion detection, to name just a few. Automatic resharding is one of the top asks in the ClickHouse community. (We're working on it.)

* How do I backup ClickHouse is one of our top 3 support questions in order of frequency. I just taught a ClickHouse class yesterday--part of a regular series--and it was the first question out of the gate from the audience. It has come up at some point in almost every customer engagement I can think of.

In my experience, your comment is only correct for relatively small applications that are not critical to the business.