Data Storage & Backup

Data storage solutions, databases, backup strategies, disaster recovery, data protection, and storage technologies.

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Aug 9, 2026

Data Storage & BackupTechFeatured

A backup you have never restored is not a backup

We had nightly database dumps running for two years. Green ticks in the dashboard, files in object storage, everything looked fine. Then we needed one. The dumps were being written with a flag that excluded large object data, and nobody had ever tried loading one into an empty database to check. What we do now, and I would recommend to anyone: • A scheduled job restores last night's dump into a throwaway database. • It counts rows per table and compares them against the source. • It runs one real query the application uses, and fails loudly if the result is wrong. It takes about four minutes a night. The first time we ran it, it failed — which is exactly the point. If you take one thing from this: the question is not "do we have backups". It is "when did we last restore one".

Indian Tech CommunityManager

Jul 25, 2026

Data Storage & BackupStorageNASCloud

NAS vs cloud-only for a small studio's raw footage — anyone still running local storage in 2026?

We're a small design/video studio generating a lot of raw footage. Cloud egress costs for repeated access are adding up. Is a local NAS with cloud backup still the sensible middle ground, or has cloud tooling made this unnecessary now?

Indian Tech CommunityManager

Jun 1, 2026

Data Storage & BackupObject StorageData ResidencyCloud

S3-compatible storage on Indian providers — anyone running production workloads on local alternatives?

Latency and data residency are pushing us to look at Indian/regional object storage providers instead of routing everything through AWS Mumbai. Anyone running real production traffic on local S3-compatible options and how has reliability been?

Indian Tech CommunityManager

May 20, 2026

Data Storage & BackupPostgreSQLBackupDatabase

Point-in-time recovery is not optional once you have real users — how we set it up on Postgres

Learned this the hard way after a bad migration wiped rows with no way back except a stale nightly dump. Set up WAL archiving with point-in-time recovery on Postgres, tested a full recovery drill, documented the runbook. Total setup was about a day, would recommend doing it before you need it.

Indian Tech CommunityManager

Apr 17, 2026

Data Storage & BackupDisaster RecoveryIncident ResponseDevOps

Ran our first real DR drill and half our 'documented' recovery steps were outdated

We'd had a DR runbook for over a year, never tested. First real drill: two of the six steps referenced infrastructure we'd since migrated away from, and one credential had rotated without the doc being updated. Painful but far better to find out in a drill than an actual outage.

Indian Tech CommunityManager

Mar 30, 2026

Data Storage & BackupComplianceBackupData Governance

What retention period do you actually use for backups vs what compliance says you need?

Our compliance doc says 7 years for certain records but our actual backup retention is 90 days rolling. Trying to figure out the right split between hot backups, cold archive, and what genuinely needs multi-year retention without ballooning storage costs.