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:
