I Built BackupGuardian After a 3AM Production Disaster Taught Me Not to Trust "Good" Backups

The 3AM Wake-Up Call That Changed Everything

Picture this: 3 AM, production migration gone wrong, and your "tested" backup is corrupted. What should have been a 30-minute rollback became 6 hours of panic and very angry customers.

The Problem

Our PostgreSQL backup passed all basic checks:

• ✅ File size correct
• ✅ No obvious corruption
• ✅ Basic syntax validation passed

But during restoration? 5 BEGIN statements, 0 COMMIT statements. Our data was trapped in transaction limbo.

The Solution: BackupGuardian

I built BackupGuardian to validate backups BEFORE disaster strikes.

What it does:

• Deep structure analysis (catches transaction integrity issues)
• Multi-database support (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite)
• Web app + CLI for CI/CD integration
• Detailed reports showing exactly what's wrong

Tech stack: Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, deployed on Railway + Vercel

Try It Now

Web: backupguardian.org

CLI:

bash
npm install -g backup-guardian
backup-guardian validate your-backup.sql
Source: GitHub

Your Turn
What's your worst backup disaster story? What validation features would have saved you?

Building this in the open and would love your feedback!

Follow along as I continue improving BackupGuardian based on real developer needs.