If you are a database administrator, you have probably heard of ClusterControl by Severalnines. ClusterControl is a full-fledged database management system that can help you with backup management, monitoring, alerting, deployment, scaling, upgrading and patching your database clusters, configuring and securing them, automatic recovery and repair, performance tuning (or, if you’re lazy, provide you with some performance advisors that will do the job for you.) However, to properly control your database clusters you must take care of backups; ClusterControl does have this functionality, however, it’s not that well advanced as in Backup Ninja.

Why Backup?

As we have already mentioned in some of our previous blog posts, backing up your data can help you solve a number of problems:

• Once your data is backed up, you no longer need to worry about what happens if something goes wrong with your database servers: did they burn down? No issues - restore your backups and you’re good to go! Restoring your backups might be a little harder if you use tools like ClusterControl because you need a deeper understanding of your underlying database architecture.
• If your data is backed up to the cloud, it’s available - always. No matter what happens to your hard drives, you can always count on the cloud: it’s reliable, and also very secure. Both ClusterControl and Backup Ninja have this functionality, however, it might be easier to use in Backup Ninja due to the fact that Backup Ninja’s entire focus is backing up data - ClusterControl is more focused on the general database management side of things.
• When you have backed up your data, you can easily restore it (if you use proper backup tools that is) - proper backup tools, such as the one developed by Backup Ninja, can let you restore data in just one or two clicks.

Backups can be an effective way of controlling your database clusters because if you’re in control of your backups, you’re in control of what can happen once your database clusters encounter some sort of issues.

Backup Ninja can be your reliable backup partner: it can help you back up all kinds of database instances including MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Percona Server, and even TimescaleDB. It can also let you schedule your backups:

As far as backup scheduling is concerned, you can choose a schedule name, you can select the server you want to perform the backup on, select the backup method, and backup type, also select if you want to backup a database per file or not. Backup Ninja also allows you to enable or disable point-in-time recovery if you so desire. Backups can also be uploaded to the cloud - click Cloud Credentials and you will be able to see all of the cloud credentials you have associated with your Backup Ninja account:

With that being said, bear in mind that Backup Ninja can also be useful for a bunch of other things as well: for example, if you need a tool that is able to alert you (automatically) once something goes wrong in the backup space, you’ve got a companion too. Backup Ninja can let you receive notifications when a schedule is created, removed, paused, or when it resumes its operations, etc.: if you are looking for a reliable partner in the backup space, Backup Ninja is the way to go.