Healthchecks.io (Self-Hosted): Making Sure Your Cron Jobs Actually Ran

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Here is a story that has happened to almost everyone who has ever written a cron job. You set up a nightly backup. You test it once, it works, you feel responsible and adult. Eight months later you actually need that backup, and you discover it stopped running in March because of a full disk, an expired token, or a typo you made while “tidying up.” The cron job didn’t fail loudly. It failed silently, which is the worst way for anything to fail, and nobody told you because there was nobody to tell.

Why Every Side Project Should Have a Backup Plan (And How to Build One)

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Every side project starts the same way: a burst of enthusiasm, a database, and absolutely no backups. This is fine, right up until the moment it is catastrophically not fine — the disk fills, the migration goes sideways, you rm -rf the wrong directory at midnight, or the VPS provider has a bad week and your droplet evaporates with it.

I have lost data this way. Not recently, because losing data once is an education you only need to pay for the once. The lesson was not “back things up more” — everyone knows that. The lesson was that a vague intention to back things up is worth precisely nothing, and only an automated, tested, restorable backup counts. So let’s build one that actually works for a small project, without enterprise budgets or enterprise faff.

Backups - Tag - vo.rs

Healthchecks.io (Self-Hosted): Making Sure Your Cron Jobs Actually Ran

Why Every Side Project Should Have a Backup Plan (And How to Build One)