Heroku PGBackups add-ons: Why choose anything but the free one month retention option?

Question

I'm looking into database backup options for our Heroku rails app, and it looks like the free PGBackups add-ons would work well.

However, I'm confused by the options. They are:

Basic - 2 manual back-ups
Plus - 7 manual back-ups
Auto One Week - 7 automatic daily and 2 manual
Auto One Month - 7 automatic daily, 5 automatic weekly, 10 manual

They're all free. I must be missing something here because I don't see why you'd choose any but the last option. Is there a downside that I'm missing? What are the pros and cons I'm supposed to be weighing here?

Answer 1

This add on is a bit of a misnomer. For starters, all databases on Heroku are backed up by Heroku and are restorable as part of their disaster recovery processes, so you don't really need to do your own backups at all to be honest, but better safe than sorry.

However, peace of mind is a good thing, and if you want your own SQL dumps of your database on a periodic basis then choosing one of these options is up to you. If you're paranoid, go for the last option. If you're just running a staging environment, choose the first, it's up to you.

Note that the PGBackups dumps go into their S3 buckets, so if you want your own copy you'll need to then download them from there.

For more information on what Heroku do out of the box, see here: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-documentation#continuous_protection

Answer 2

If you have a dev or basic plan for Heroku Postgres, you cannot choose the auto- options. That's the point.

Answer 3

This isn't necessarily an answer to the question, but here's what I do with my Heroku database backups and I thought anybody else that comes to this thread might find it useful.

Just choose the free pgbackups add-on and use a local cron task to dump and download the dump daily.

Here's my script that I have cron run:

#!/bin/bash
now=$(date +"%y%m%d_%H%M")
fn="/home/username/dumps/backup_$now.dump"
cd /home/username/app && heroku pgbackups:capture --expire
cd /home/username/app && heroku pgbackups:url | xargs wget -O $fn

The now variable is simply to append the date and time to the filename. fn is the file path.

The 3rd line:

cd /home/username/app && heroku pgbackups:capture --expire

changes to the Heroku app directory then runs the Heroku call to pgbackups to create a dump and also remove the oldest dump.

The 4th line:

cd /home/username/app && heroku pgbackups:url | xargs wget -O $fn

gets the temporary URL of the dump file and uses wget to download and rename the file to the file path that I set in line 2: fn.

This has worked really well for me, and I can rest assured that I have daily backups of my database. I will soon expand this to remove local backups that are older than 90 days.