Backups Your Startup Actually Needs (And Can Afford)
For a typical SaaS, €50–€200/month buys real disaster recovery: automated database dumps plus versioned object storage, one encrypted copy at a different provider or region, and tiered retention — daily×14, weekly×8, monthly×12. Pick your RPO and RTO consciously (4h/24h is a fine answer), and restore to a scratch environment once a quarter. An untested backup is a hope, not a backup.
Backups are the part of the stack nobody sees until the day everyone does. We've reviewed enough startup setups to know the default state: a nightly dump on the same server, never restored once.
The 3-2-1-ish setup a startup can afford
Four pieces, all automatable in a day or two:
- Automated database dumps on a schedule, plus versioning on your object storage for files
- One copy at a different provider (or at minimum a different region), with its own credentials
- Encryption before upload — backups are a full copy of your most sensitive data
- Tiered retention: daily×14, weekly×8, monthly×12 — covers "we noticed three weeks later" without paying to keep everything forever
Which failure scenarios are you actually covered for?
Each scenario needs a different property of your setup — this is why "we have backups" isn't a yes/no question:
| Failure scenario | What covers it | Typical extra cost |
|---|---|---|
| Fat-fingered delete | Daily dumps + storage versioning | Nearly free |
| Ransomware / account takeover | Second provider, separate credentials | €10–€50/month |
| Provider outage | Off-provider copy + rehearsed restore | Covered by the above |
| Whole-region loss | Cross-region replication | €20–€100/month |
The row teams miss is account takeover. If an attacker who owns your cloud account can also delete your backups, you don't have backups — you have two copies of the same risk. Different provider, different credentials, ideally with delete protection.
RPO and RTO: decide the two numbers consciously
RPO: how much data can you afford to lose. RTO: how long can you afford to be down. For most startups, an honest 4-hour RPO and 24-hour RTO is perfectly fine — and cheap. Pretending you need zero/zero is expensive theater: near-zero targets mean streaming replication, hot standbys, and an on-call rotation, easily 10x the cost. Decide the two numbers with the founders, write them down, and build to exactly that — not to what an enterprise checklist implies.
Restore quarterly or it doesn't count
Once a quarter: restore the latest backup into a scratch environment, boot the app against it, and time the whole thing. This drill catches expired credentials, dumps that silently stopped including a table, and restores that take nine hours against a four-hour promise. It costs an afternoon — and every failure it finds would otherwise have been found on the worst day of your company's life.
At €50–€200/month, the whole setup costs less than one hour of data-loss panic. It's the same logic as the kill switch every MVP needs: cheap insurance you design before you need it.
Want your backup story pressure-tested — scenarios, RPO/RTO, restore drill? That's part of every cloud & DevOps audit we run.
Olio on LinkedIn
