We don't know the structure of their DB and whether failover is important or not, so we don't know if the DB can be reliably pulled as a flat file backup and still have consistent data.
We also don't know how big the dataset is or how often it changes. Sometimes "backup over your home cable connection" just isn't practical.
Cron jobs can (and do) silently fail in all kinds of annoying and idiotic ways.
And as most of us are all too painfully aware, sometimes you make less-than-ideal decisions when faced with a long pipeline of customer bug reports and feature requests, vs. addressing the potential situation that could sink you but has like a 1 in 10,000 chance of happening any given day.
But yes, granted that as a quick stop-gap solution it's better than nothing.
> We also don't know how big the dataset is or how often it changes.
I'm going to take a stab at small and infrequently.
Every 2-3 months we had to execute a python script that takes 1s on all our data (500k rows), to make it faster we execute it in parallel on multiple droplets ~10 that we set up only for this pipeline and shut down once itβs done.
Yeah, probably. But we shouldn't be calling these guys out for not taking the "obvious and simple" solution when we aren't 100% certain that it would actually work. That happens too often on HN, and then sometimes the people involved pop in to explain why it's not so simple, and everyone goes "...oh." Seems like we should learn something from that. I've gone with "don't assume it's as simple as your ego would lead you to believe."
I suggested that solution because everyone is saying "they're only a two-man shop so they don't have the time and money to do things properly". Anyone has the time and money to do the above, and there's a 90% chance that it would save them in a situation like this.
Even if they lost some data, even if the backup silently failed and hadn't been running for two months, it's the difference between a large inconvenience and literally your whole business disappearing.
We don't know the structure of their DB and whether failover is important or not, so we don't know if the DB can be reliably pulled as a flat file backup and still have consistent data.
We also don't know how big the dataset is or how often it changes. Sometimes "backup over your home cable connection" just isn't practical.
Cron jobs can (and do) silently fail in all kinds of annoying and idiotic ways.
And as most of us are all too painfully aware, sometimes you make less-than-ideal decisions when faced with a long pipeline of customer bug reports and feature requests, vs. addressing the potential situation that could sink you but has like a 1 in 10,000 chance of happening any given day.
But yes, granted that as a quick stop-gap solution it's better than nothing.