Your side project makes $800/month. Your laptop is the only copy of the database. And tonight, a bad deploy is going to delete it. Not maybe — statistically, eventually. The difference between the projects that survive and the ones that vanish is not talent. It is a 20-minute drill you keep postponing.
Here is the drill. Run it once this week, then automate it, and you will never think about backups again (which is the point).
Step 1: List what actually dies (5 minutes)
Write down, on one line each, every thing that would hurt: the production database, the payment webhooks config, the .env file, the DNS settings, the cron jobs. Most people discover they have never exported their .env. That file is your business.
Step 2: Make one machine-agnostic copy (5 minutes)
For each item, one command that dumps it somewhere that is NOT the same disk, NOT the same machine, and NOT your only cloud account. A nightly sqlite3 app.db ".backup /backup/app-$(date +%F).db" pushed to object storage beats a backup strategy you never finished. An untested backup is a rumor.
Step 3: The restore test — the part everyone skips (10 minutes)
Spin up a fresh directory (a different machine or a disposable VM) and restore. Time it. If restoring takes longer than 30 minutes or needs a question answered in Slack by past-you, your backup is decorative. Fix the two steps that hurt. Re-run next month.
Step 4: The deploy seatbelt (bonus, 2 minutes)
Before every deploy, one line in your script: dump the database with a date-stamped filename. Deploys are when disasters happen, so attach the safety net to the deploy itself, not to discipline. You will not remember to be disciplined at 11 p.m.
That is the whole drill. Twenty minutes, run once, then automated. The businesses that lose a week — or lose the whole project — skipped exactly this.
If you want the pre-built version: I keep a set of backup, monitoring, and recovery scripts — the same set we ship in the Ops Starter Kit, and the wider automation playbook in the Automation Starter Pack. If you would rather grab everything at once, the Ops Mega Bundle has the full set.
Run the drill tonight. Future-you at 2 a.m. does not get a vote.
Top comments (0)