February 22, 2026
A backup that has never been restored is not a backup. This guide covers the tools, when to use each, and how to verify your backups work.
Logical backups export SQL statements. Portable across versions but slow for large databases. Physical backups copy raw InnoDB data files. Fast but tied to the same MySQL version. Physical backups are essential once your database exceeds a few hundred gigabytes.
February 22, 2026
SQLite is not a toy database. It handles more read traffic than any other database engine in the world – every Android phone, iOS device, and major web browser runs SQLite. The question is whether your workload fits its concurrency model: single-writer, multiple-reader. If it does, SQLite eliminates an entire class of operational overhead with no server process, no network protocol, and no connection authentication.
Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) mode is the single most important configuration for production SQLite. In the default rollback journal mode, writers block readers and readers block writers. WAL removes this limitation.
February 21, 2026
Kubernetes clusters contain two fundamentally different types of state: cluster state (the Kubernetes objects themselves – Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps, Secrets, CRDs) and application data (the contents of Persistent Volumes). A complete backup strategy must address both. Most backup failures happen because teams back up one but not the other, or because they never test the restore process.
Before choosing tools, inventory what your cluster contains: