What is backup and restore?

Backup: Imagine on a Sunday morning, your hard drive dies. You can't access anything. Your bitcoin wallet's private key is the only copy, and it's on that hard drive. Sounds horrifying, right? That's when a backup comes in handy and saves the day (and maybe your life too).

Restore: Backups are amazing, but if done incorrectly, you're screwed. So every time you make a backup, make sure to try restoring it, even just once is more than enough. You'll thank yourself later. You'll feel like a god, being able to see the future and prevent disasters.

In this era of information, it's crucial to have a snapshot of your important data somewhere else. Having three copies will do the trick. More is even better.

What is Sqlite3?

Sqlite3 is an amazing database; you don't need to run any processes for your database anymore. Just write to a single database file db.sqlite3 and you will have more than enough for 90% of whatever you want to build. And if you only have one file, backing up and restoring it is very simple, if you use Litestream.

What is Litestream?

You can read more about Litestream here.

Litestream is a streaming replication tool for SQLite databases. It runs as a separate background process and continuously copies write-ahead log pages from disk to one or more replicas. This asynchronous replication provides disaster recovery similar to what is available with database servers like Postgres or MySQL.

Summary: it's a backup tool for Sqlite3. And it's only write the changes, so it's very fast and space-efficient.

Tutorial

Imagine you have a Django project, and you want to backup your Sqlite3 database. Here is how you do it.

Given that your database file is in ./db.sqlite3.

Install Litestream (For ubuntu users)

wget 'https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/releases/download/v0.3.11/litestream-v0.3.11-linux-amd64.deb'

sudo dpkg -i litestream-v0.3.11-linux-amd64.deb

rm litestream-v0.3.11-linux-amd64.deb

First you need to set some ENVs:

export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your-aws-secret AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your-aws-key REPLICA_URL="s3://backup/your-project"

Backup

For example, you have a bucket on S3 named backup, and you want to backup your database to that bucket.

You can run this command to start backing up:

litestream replicate ./db.sqlite3 "${REPLICA_URL}"

That's it. You can run this command in a screen/tmux session, or use systemd to run it as a service. Now your database is backed up every time you write to it. The interval is 1 second.

Restore

To restore (on other location), all you need to do is

litestream restore -v -if-replica-exists -o ./db.sqlite3 "${REPLICA_URL}"

Awesome, right?