[benbjohnson]

Litestream & LiteFS author here. I think single-node, easily-recoverable systems are great and it fits a lot of people's use cases. VPS providers are pretty reliable too so even using a regular hourly backup can be good enough for some people. We even have docs for a cron-based backup [1] on the Litestream docs site.

You're right that HA is one benefit of LiteFS. But I think another important difference is reducing geographic latency. It's possible to spin up read replicas & failovers for Postgres or MySQL and then run application servers for each one of those but it's a huge pain. Or you can pay a serverless database provider but that's expensive. One of the goals with LiteFS is to simply be able to add application nodes in different regions and automagically have faster read latency to people near those regions.

[1]: https://litestream.io/alternatives/cron/