HN

Comments (13)

• Menu

  sebmellen
  > There are other tools in this space. Worth naming plainly instead of pretending they don't exist.Why do LLMs like this kind of writing? Why did you need to “plainly” name the competition as opposed to “flamboyantly” naming them?This is a cool idea but the README is absurdly not-to-the-point.
• csydas
  i saw your now dead comment about how no one you interviewed had an answer…just it’s surprising to me that devops folk aren’t in an org that has backup software, cause this kind of testing is standard load out for most backup softwares, and they even solve the space and isolation issue with various instant restore / publishing capabilities where data from the backup is mounted directly to some staging server with postgres or whatever installed in an isolated areanot trying to knock the idea you are correct most ppl don’t test their backups, but it’s a bit strange no one you talked to used any of the most common backup softwaresdefinitely in favor of free solutions as backup software field is awful like many ent tech fields, but like the workflows do exist
• Menu

  lbrito
  This is a great idea and something I've faced and had to implement manually in the past.The most common scenario for me was: I implement backup, done by a daily cron calling pg_dump. It worked and I moved on, until one day I needed to restore and the backups did not work. Typically at some point the VM failed to run the commands to clear temporary backup files, the disk would fill up and the new backups would be truncated mid way.psql is pretty awful at identifying this which must be a very common scenario. Instead of a header check leading to "Corrupted backup, aborting" or something, it simply executes the SQL commands until it reaches the very last line, which will be truncated midway and thus invalid SQL.Anyway, it took some time to figure out, but later I did basically what your tool does, probably simpler: another daily cron job that downloads the file and checks if it ends with the correct pg_dump success signature. It has worked so far.
• sebastiangrill
  The problem i see with this approach is that nearly nobody uses dumps as backups. I consulted Postgres for a few hundred customers and the amount of times that I saw dumps as Backup can probably be counted on two hands.Does not help that the description reads like AI slop.
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  davedx
  This is a great idea. Anything that makes this easier is a win for ops teams.
• vladigtr
  [flagged]
• ahmadpiran
  Nobody disputes that backups need testing. Almost nobody actually does it, because there's no safe place to restore to and no time to build one. The people who do automate it usually end up with a cron job and a shell script that fails in its own quiet way. The real risk was never a bad backup. It's that quietly not running, or quietly restoring the same stale file, month after month, with nobody noticing.restoredrill turns that drill into a single command. It grabs your latest backup, restores it into a disposable Docker container, runs whatever checks you configure, and writes out a JSON report with the restore time. Every check is fail-closed: if it can't run, that's a failure, not something quietly skipped.Before writing a line of code I spent a couple weeks asking around r/devops and a few compliance subreddits how people actually handle this. Nobody had a clean answer, it was all bespoke scripts or nothing at all. A handful had already built close to this exact tool for themselves and hit the same wall every time: automating the restore was the easy part, getting a report format an auditor would sign off on took months. That's what shaped most of the report schema here.The quickstart is meant to take about 10 minutes start to finish: pg_dump a Supabase or RDS database, point restoredrill at the file, run it against a local container. No production access, no S3, no CI required just to try it.Worth naming the alternatives up front. Databasus is a solid self-hosted backup platform, several database engines, full dashboard, restore verification built in. BackupDrill does something close to this specifically for Supabase. restoredrill is narrower on purpose: no dashboard, a report built for an auditor (fail-closed checks, RPO/RTO evidence, your own SQL assertions), and it runs as a CI job instead of infrastructure you have to host.Postgres only for the moment, pgBackRest and WAL support are on the roadmap. MIT licensed. Repo: https://github.com/ahmadpiran/restoredrillWould like to hear what people think, especially if you've built something like this yourself and ran into the same report-format problem.
• anon
  undefined