[gwking]

I depend on litestream for production backups and as the months wear on without any releases I am getting more nervous. To be clear, I don’t feel entitled to anything with an open source project like this, but bug reports and fixes seem to be accumulating. I have flirted with the idea of building from main.

I’ve also flirted with the idea of forking litestream and stripping it down dramatically. The reason why is that I don’t like the idea of the production server being in charge of rotation and deletion. It seems like the thing getting backed up shouldn’t have the privilege of deleting backups in case it gets compromised. I might even go so far as to propose that the “even liter stream” process merely writes to a different local volume and then some other process does the uploading but I haven’t gotten beyond the daydream stage.

[normie3000]

Having run litestream in prod for 2+ years, I share all of these concerns.

> It seems like the thing getting backed up shouldn’t have the privilege of deleting backups in case it gets compromised.

For backups, I added a nightly cron job which exports my SQLite db to a write-only S3 bucket.

[superq]

If that will fit your RPO, why not only do that? Saves a lot of complexity (and risk).

[normie3000]

It doesn't fit my RPO.

What's the additional risk?

[superq]

Complexity == risk.

> It seems like the thing getting backed up shouldn’t have the privilege of deleting backups in case it gets compromised.

(agreed)

> For backups, I added a nightly cron job which > exports my SQLite db to a write-only S3 bucket.

Why not only do this and use an s3 sync instead? You can safely backup SQLite databases while they're being written to, so no need to export (dump) them; just copy the files themselves.

This might mean that your entire backup/restore strategy is just to copy some files. If so, that's ideal.

(Of course, s3 sync does require reading as well as writing, so perhaps just increase your cron job to run more often so it fits within your RPO)

[normie3000]

I'm starting to buy it.

> You can safely backup SQLite databases while they're being written to

Is this true with WAL enabled?

[chubot]

What kind of bugs have you experienced or are you worried about? Backup software shouldn’t need to be frequently updated

[dspillett]

I think the implication isn't that there are bugs they are immediately concerned about, but that other issues not being addressed might mean that should they run into a bug that does cause problems there may not be a timely solution, if any.

[edoceo]

And comine with the session features that @rogerbinns mentioned. Feels resilient.