Ask HN: How do you track what's backed up?
2 atomicnature 1 9/8/2025, 5:53:20 PM
My team recently lost some production data - not because backups failed, but because some critical things weren’t tracked at all.
Postgres dumps -> backed up
GitLab repos -> backed up
Ghost configs -> backed up
Listmonk database -> NOT backed up
Snapshots exist, but they’re heavy and don’t make it clear whether everything important is included. Also, there's the overhead of managing them, policies, etc - which just feels like overkill. Backing up the entire OS and temp files and so on doesn't sit well with me.
Ad-hoc scripts give an illusion of safety -- but practically it’s easy to miss something (we had a bunch of scripts/cron for this stuff).
The hard part isn’t running backups -- it’s visibility: knowing what needs backup, what’s actually covered, and where it lives.
How do you handle this in your organization? What’s the hardest part of tracking backups in practice?
Comments (1)
toomuchtodo · 2h ago
A data inventory should be the source of truth, which should flow into backup strategy and technical implementation details. You cannot backup (or manage the lifecycle of) what you do not know you have or aren't tracking.