How can I maintain daily SQL Server backups in App Harbor / Sequelizer

Question

I've seen a few posts on this, but I just want to make sure I'm not missing something.

I'm seriously considering moving from Azure to App Harbor, but I'm a bit dismayed that there doesn't seem to be a way to maintain daily SQL Server database backups.

I understand that App Harbor maintains daily file system snapshots. This is great for recovering from a catastrophic failure, but doesn't do much to deal with recovering from user errors. For example, if I accidentally delete a chunk of rows, I may want to restore a database from a few days ago to help recover.

I know about these tools for transferring data to/from App Harbor: - "Generate Scripts" tool in SQL Management Studio - Bulk copy tool: https://github.com/appharbor/AppHarbor-SqlServerBulkCopy

Those are fine for doing a one-off backup or restore, but I'm looking to figure out some way to back up data automatically, and ideally save it off to AWS S3 storage. Is there a tool or service out there that could possibly do this?

Thank you!

Answer 1

I've created a simple console app that does a daily backup of tables in a SQL Server database. The output is then zipped and uploaded to Amazon S3 storage. This app can be deployed as an AppHarbor background worker. No local SQL server required!

See notes in the readme file for instructions and limitations. This does what we need for now, but I'm happy to let others work on the project if you'd like to extend it.

https://bitbucket.org/ManicBlowfish/ah-dbbackup