Show HN: Uphold – Tool for programmatically verifying database backups

I created this tool a while ago, but since it&#x27;s apparently world backup day I thought it a good time to submit it here. It was created out of the fact that we run automated backups of our various databases, yet we very rarely attempted a restore. This allows me to know for sure that the backup was created and that it&#x27;s available, accessible &amp; restorable. You can then if you want to, programmatically test the contents of the database using RSpec, just so that you make sure you aren&#x27;t backing up the wrong one inside. So now we have the backup rubygem (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;backup&#x2F;backup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;backup&#x2F;backup</a>) triggering Uphold to fully test the backup after it&#x27;s finished being made through the API.

Looks very interesting and I can possibly use this at my work.<p>I will take a closer look but what was not immediately apparent was: what kind of backups are we talking about here? mysqldump or volume snapshots ? What about incremental backups ?<p>Redis snapshots support would be awesome as well.

Nobody ever checks their backups! This is such a great way to take care of it automatically.<p>I&#x27;m not at all against sanity checks, especially of something you trust will work when you need it to like backups. But what would cause a DB backup to the filesystem to fail? When they are&#x2F;were stored on tape or other media, there is certainly the concern of media corruption. But when we&#x27;re talking about files resting on disk, what would cause a backup to be corrupt or unusable? Certainly there is some expectation that mysql&#x2F;psql can reliably dump a DB. Or is it purely for sleeping soundly at night?

&gt; then running programmatic tests against it that you define to make sure they really have what you need<p>Sounds like the crux will still depend on how well one writes these tests.<p>Agreeing that no backup is verified until it is restored... one way this can be achieved is use something like Ansible to script the backup of the database, script the restore, and run them and verify everything is backed up &#x2F; restored properly.<p>Then since everything is automated, a person can reasonably trust their backups are verified, with the full confidence if they need to do a backup&#x2F;restore, they just have to run a script.

Writing something like this has been on my todo list for what feels like forever. I&#x27;ll definitely play around with this. Thank you!