Heroku database backup strategy? [closed]

Question

I'm just setting up my backup strategy for Heroku and i'm after more information on what i need to protect against.

Obviously I need to ensure I back up to protect data loss through my own mistakes or malicious attacks etc but do I also need to protect against Heroku screwing up and losing/corrupting my data?

I.E. Can i rely on heroku to have sufficient redundancy for hardware failure etc or do i need to protect against this.

Answer 1

Heroku now provides an add-on to backup your database. It is called PG Backups.

From the add-on page:

Heroku's database backup solution. Captures and restores backups from the shared and/or dedicated PostgreSQL databases for an application. Imports data from an existing database backup, and exports backups for off-site storage.

You can keep manually 2 or 7 backups. You can also have daily automatic backups, with re-cycling, to keep for example the last 7 daily backups and the last 5 weekly backups.

Answer 2

There's never any harm in having more than one backup - I use a strategy similar to http://trevorturk.com/2010/04/14/automated-heroku-backups/ - to get a backup file to outside of Heroku (should I ever need it) but I have 100% confidence in Heroku to be honest but it's for my own sanity.