How Solinum's seven-person tech team backs up MongoDB, PostgreSQL and storage in one place

Solinum's tech team is seven people: three developers, two product managers, a data analyst and the CTO, who coordinates tech work, plans product evolution, defines the architecture and develops. Their main product is Soliguide, a directory for vulnerable people and the professionals who support them, built with TypeScript, Angular and Express.

A stack with several data stores

Soliguide's app data is in MongoDB. A data pipeline built with Dagster, Airbyte and dbt feeds an analytics database, with dashboards in Metabase and Superset on PostgreSQL.

The app runs on Clever Cloud with its database managed by OVH, and the broader stack runs on Scaleway with Kubernetes and managed databases.

From cron scripts and scp to one tool

Soliguide began on a bare DigitalOcean VM, with cron-driven bash scripts for backups and cleanup. Developers copied backups to their laptops with scp, there were no failure notifications, and backups were not stored anywhere else.

After moving away from bare VMs, the alternative was Kubernetes cron jobs with a custom API to trigger them on demand, which the CTO found less user-friendly and harder to maintain.

Simple enough for daily work

SimpleBackups handles MongoDB, PostgreSQL and S3-like storage, with backups stored in S3-like storage through an API. The CTO says serverless workers keep the setup simple: SimpleBackups plus a few shell scripts cover developers' daily tasks.

Scaleway volume backups could also be added later.

Who it suits

The CTO recommends SimpleBackups for small teams with limited Ops budgets, and suggests larger companies might use it for dedicated products.

Our backup and restore infrastructure is just SimpleBackups and a few shell scripts for developers' daily tasks.