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Re: Unly Releases an Open Source Software for Airtable Managed backups

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Ambroise_Dhenai
8 - Airtable Astronomer
8 - Airtable Astronomer

Hello everyone.

We use Airtable for various things at Unly, and we have always been concerned by the inability to create scheduled backups that really fit our needs. Despite the fact Airtable has its own backups/restore feature, it didn’t fit our needs.

And, because Airtable holds lots of business-sensitive data, it was a very big risk for us not to be in control of the backup&restore process.

So, we built a tool that is designed to perform scheduled backups automatically, and deal with backups lifecycle (auto-removal, etc.). Today, we’re releasing this proprietary software as OSS under MIT license.

Because backups are very sensitive things, it didn’t make sense to us to build something where we would hold the backups ourselves. Those are your data, and in this world controlled by GDPR and alike, nobody likes to give such sensitive information to 3rd parties. So, we built a software that runs under your AWS Account, so that you are in control of the whole thing.

We hope the Airtable community will appreciate such effort, as it is a long-required feature and need that has been asked multiple times across this forum alone.

Therefore, configuring this software will require some technical skills (AWS), even though everything has been made to make it as simple as possible. (we hate complexity too)

Regarding pricing, it is very cheap as it relies on AWS Lambda for the server part (serverless), and AWS S3 for storing the backups themselves. Calculating exactly how much it’s gonna cost is complicated, but because of AWS Free Tiers and because both Lambda and S3 are very cheap, it’s most likely not gonna cost you anything as long as you don’t save Go every hours.

We use it internally to make backups of 7 Airtable bases on a daily/weekly basis, cost will be $0 for the year. Obviously, it really depends on how often you backup, and how big are your data.

Let us know what you think about it! :slightly_smiling_face:

P.S: Check out https://github.com/unlyEd, we release lots of things as OSS :winking_face:
P.S 2: If you’d like to see what a backup looks like, take a look at https://gist.github.com/Vadorequest/045e4fa6c0963cc9d25cb847b00c7e53
PS 3: If you want to read more about backups&restoration, I strongly suggest Airtable Backup & Recovery Strategies: Simply, a Nightmare which covers a lot of the current concerns/limitations at hand

3 Replies 3
Tom_Keysers
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Great timing – I was about to start coding my own backup mechanism, but now I’m sure gonna test this one out first. Looking very solid!

Thanks for sharing guys!

Thanks! Don’t hesitate to let me know what you think about it, I’m open to suggestions :slightly_smiling_face:

Ambroise_Dhenai
8 - Airtable Astronomer
8 - Airtable Astronomer

Our podcast on BuiltOnAir about this tool has been released just today!

Don’t hesitate to check it out, there is a whole demo about how it actually works :slightly_smiling_face:
https://builtonair.com/builtonair-s04e07-ambroise-dhenain-cofounder-of-unly/