Backup Mistakes Startups Make
The backups most startups have look fine until the day they need them. The common mistakes, and a simple way to know yours will actually work.
Almost every startup I talk to has backups. Almost none of them have backups they have ever tested. That gap is where the real risk lives.
A backup is not a thing you have. It is a thing you can restore. Until you have actually restored from it, you do not have a backup, you have a hopeful copy of some files. Most of the mistakes below come from confusing the two.
This article walks through the backup mistakes I see most often, frames them around the simple 3-2-1 idea, and gives you a way to find out whether your backups are real before the day you need them.
Never testing a restore
This is the big one, and it sits underneath all the others. A backup that has never been restored is an assumption, not a safeguard.
Restores fail for boring reasons. The backup file is corrupt. The format changed and the new tooling cannot read the old dump. A required extension is missing. The credentials in the backup no longer match anything. None of this shows up while backups are quietly running every night. All of it shows up the one morning you actually need them.
The fix is a restore drill: take a recent backup, restore it into a throwaway environment, and confirm the application boots and the data is there. Do it once now. Then put a reminder in the calendar to do it again every quarter. The first drill almost always finds something.
Keeping backups on the same provider and region
If your database lives in one cloud provider and your backups live in the same account, in the same region, you are protected against one thing: accidentally deleting a row. You are not protected against an account suspension, a billing dispute, a region outage, or a compromised login that can reach both.
This is the heart of the 3-2-1 idea, without the jargon: keep at least three copies of your data, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy somewhere else entirely. The “somewhere else” is the part startups skip. An offsite copy in a different provider, or at least a different account and region, is what turns a bad day into an inconvenient day.
Better still is an immutable copy, one that cannot be deleted or overwritten for a set period, even by someone with full access. If ransomware or a disgruntled login can reach your backups, they were never really backups.
Backing up the database but nothing else
The database gets all the attention. The rest of the system gets none, and the rest of the system is often what you cannot rebuild.
Three things commonly fall through the gap:
Uploads and user files. Images, documents, exports, anything stored outside the database. If these live on a disk or bucket that is not in your backup scope, a restored database will point at files that no longer exist.
Secrets and configuration. API keys, environment variables, certificates, the exact config that makes the app run. Restore the data without these and you have a database nobody can connect to.
Infrastructure definition. How the servers were set up. If it lives only in someone’s head, recovery time depends on that person being available and remembering.
A useful test: imagine the entire account is gone tomorrow. List everything you would need to rebuild the running product. Then check that each item is backed up somewhere outside that account.
No documented restore procedure
Even a perfect backup is slow to use if nobody knows how. During an outage is the worst possible time to be figuring out the steps for the first time, under pressure, possibly without the one person who set it all up.
A restore procedure does not need to be elaborate. One page: where the backups are, how to access them, the exact commands to restore, what to check afterwards, and who to call. Written so that someone who is not you could follow it. If only one person can restore the system, your real recovery time is “however long until that person picks up the phone”.
Assuming the managed provider has it covered
Managed databases and platforms often do take backups. That is genuinely helpful, and it is also where a lot of false confidence comes from.
Read what they actually promise. Many keep backups for only seven days, which does not help with a problem you notice in week three. Many cannot protect you if your own account gets suspended or compromised, the backups live in the same account. And almost none of them back up your uploads, secrets, or configuration, only the database they manage.
“The provider has it covered” is a reasonable starting point and a dangerous finishing point. Know exactly what is covered, then own the gaps yourself.
RPO and RTO in plain language
Two terms worth knowing, because they turn a vague worry into a decision.
RPO, recovery point objective: how much data can you afford to lose? If you back up once a night, your RPO is up to a day, you could lose everything since the last backup. If a day of lost data is unacceptable, you need more frequent backups.
RTO, recovery time objective: how long can you afford to be down while you restore? Untested backups and undocumented procedures quietly make this number much larger than founders assume.
You do not need aggressive targets. You need honest ones. Decide what you can live with, then build backups that actually meet it.
A simple way to check
For founders who want one rule to act on:
A backup you have not restored is not a backup. Restore one into a clean environment, with the database, the uploads, the secrets and the config, and only then do you know what you have.
The launch check before going live covers the same instinct from the other side: confirm the things that protect customers actually work, before you have to find out the hard way.
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