I’ve created a service to Backup your Bubble data.
Why?
With paying customers on your platform, the worst possible event is the loss or corruption of the data that you store on their behalf.
But can’t you roll back the database on Bubble?
You can roll back your entire database to a given timestamp. In the real world, you will most likely be looking to recover specific customer accounts or records - for this, it’s just not feasible to regress all of your user’s data.
You might also find peace of mind knowing that you have an off-Bubble, fail-safe store of all of your records, should that ever be needed.
How does it work?
Once you’ve signed up, you can schedule daily backups of your Bubble tables.
You can download your data as CSV files for import back into Bubble.
Your backups are stored in AWS and available to you anytime.
As part of using Plan B, you will also get a detailed report of your Database schema, alongside monitoring of significant changes to your Database.
There is a free plugin to install and a registration key to enter into the plugin - start a free trial here https://planbbackups.io
I’ve been doing trials with beta users for a few months now and so far have backed up nearly 4 million rows!
We’ve been beta testing Plan B for the last few months for automated daily backups of our critical tables.
In short, it’s fantastic and it’s never missed a beat.
If your software is B2B or enterprise-y then I’m not sure it’s viable to operate without something like this in place.
What we like about it is… 1) We can now say to customers that all data is backed up every 24 hrs and we don’t have to lift a finger. 2) When we go-live with mistakes which impact customer data - which we sometimes do - we can now roll back only the affected customers / tables / areas. Not being able to do this is a terrible situation to end up in. 3) It feels simple and secure, and @lindsay_knowcode is always v responsive when we have questions.
Plan B doesn’t right now but it is possible and I’ve been toying with the concept. Very nicely AWS lets you query CSV files in S3. And the backups are all in S3. So it is entirely possible to query your backup files.
It’s very cool. But I was wondering if anyone had a use case? What are you trying to do?
Happy to chat about it, but I think the biggest opportunity/gap for folks in the Bubble world is being able to SQL-query our Bubble tables for BI purposes. It’s frankly astonishing how this isn’t possible yet. We write every important table to a MySQL database using the SQL DB Connector and then use Metabase to build dashboards, but it’s incredibly time consuming to set up and maintain.
No reason why you couldn’t SQL query your CSV Bubble backups - the daily export is already automated. It’s just a matter of exposing the SQL query side … I always thought a use case for Plan B was for data export and migrations - but as a BI data source …
Hi, this looks very promising!
When exporting, can I filter the exported data by one of the underlying data fields (e.g. created by)?
Asking because a customer of mine would like to have backups of his data
Do you mean within a table, filter out just some rows? Not today. But why not just back up the whole table? And every customer (I am guessing). How many rows are your tables?
@rhea One thing I know from looking at the schemas of Bubble apps is they are noteworthy for their variety. Here are two example apps …
49 tables - the largest is 20k rows
135,000 rows 2979 WU
9 Tables
1 of 47,000 rows
The other 8 tables < 100 rows 1689 WU
So this is the daily cost of WU to backup these two apps.
When I look at this What contributes to workload? - Bubble Docs and then look at what WU number totals are in the Log of an app - I haven’t managed to figure out what the formula is to determine the WU usage for Data API calls.
One strategy to optimise your WU is only to back up those tables that need backing up daily. For static tables there is a button in the Plan B UI to “take an ad hoc backup now” - so just get Plan B to scan you schema then decide which tables you want to backup daily - and ad hoc backup the rest.
On the road map is having more frequency options (weekly, not just daily) to help with WU efficiency.