You might want to take a look at using RDS. The backup options there are much better, and you can access the database through your favorite SQL client. They use a transaction log, which means you can recover to a specific point in time. Also, they've got these nifty "Read Replicas" which can be a big help if you need a reporting database or something similar.
It's important to remember that you might want to access a backup due to bugs in your code that destroy data, or some kind of blunder by your DBA. It's not enough to know that Heroku can recover from their own train wrecks. On Nov 17, 10:03 am, Paul Dowman <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks for the reply. So it's not actually possible to guarantee that > there will be no data loss, the best we can do is an hourly backup > (assuming the data set is small enough that a full dump each hour is > feasible). > > So why does the marketing page (http://heroku.com/how/architecture) > say that there's replication? > > Thanks, > Paul > > On Nov 16, 5:02 pm, Peter van Hardenberg <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hey Paul, > > > sorry -- I'm super-busy right now but I'll at least tap out a bit of a > > reply. > > > On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 1:34 PM, Paul Dowman <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hey Heroku guys, just bumping this thread. > > > > To summarize: do we need to do automated regular backups to protect > > > against Postgres or some other part of Heroku infrastructure going > > > down, or is the database guaranteed to be reliable? > > > We take automated backups as disaster insurance, but make no promises about > > their intervals. In the event of an outage, we handle recovery. If there is > > the potential for data loss, we reach out to any affected users. > > > > I'm guessing we do, and if so how do we do that since an hourly dump > > > of postgres via cron isn't reliable enough or scalable? (i.e. you can > > > lose up to an hour of data, and more as the dump starts to take longer > > > with a large dataset.) > > > Hourly dumps is probably your best solution at the moment, but we're aware > > that there are better solutions out there and would love to schedule those > > into our release schedule some time soon. > > > Having said that, in the three years we've been running PostgreSQL, I > > believe the number of data-loss failures (and by that I mean > > restore-from-backup failures) could be counted on one hand. > > > -pvh -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Heroku" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en.
