We created Remora Backup to answer a question we kept encountering on our own Heroku projects: How do we reliably and securely store an offsite backup of our Postgres data?
We love Heroku. We’ve built many projects and businesses over the last 10+ years that run on and rely on Heroku. We also understand that Heroku is built on AWS, so ultimately, all of our apps and data reside on AWS services. Which is great.
Until AWS has an outage or issue.
And if you’re like us, your Postgres data is the lifeblood of your business. You might have a few hundred MBs of data, or many hundreds of GBs, but in the end, if you lose your database, you lose your business.
Storing a backup of your Postgres data offsite, off Heroku, and thus off AWS, is smart. It’s also a legal requirement for some businesses.
While working on disaster recovery scenarios for one of our recent projects, we found ourselves creating a process to backup our Postgres data and store it elsewhere. Once it was running reliably, we used it on another project. And then some of our colleagues in the industry heard about it, and asked to use it.
At this point, we realized we had the beginnings of a Heroku Add-on, and work began in earnest to create an official service. A few months later, Remora Backup was released!