Databasus

What is Databasus and why should I use it instead of hand-rolled scripts?

Databasus is an Apache 2.0 licensed, self-hosted service backing up PostgreSQL, v13 to v18. It differs from shell scripts in that it has a frontend for scheduling tasks, compressing and storing archives on multiple targets (local disk, S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, SFTP, rclone, etc.), configuring retention policies to automatically prune old backups and notifying your team when tasks finish or fail — all without hand-rolled code

How do I install Databasus in the quickest manner?

The most direct route is to run the one-line cURL installer. It fetches the current Docker image, spins up a single PostgreSQL container. Then creates a docker-compose.yml and boots up the service so it will automatically start again when reboots occur. Overall time is usually less than two minutes on a typical VPS.

How restore verification works?

Databasus runs a small verification agent on a host you control. On every scheduled run the agent downloads the latest backup. It restores the backup into a throwaway database container. Then it sanity-checks the restored database against the source. The result is reported back — including the restore exit code and per-table row counts. Schedules support after backup, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or a UTC cron expression. Failures can be sent through any notifier wired to the database — Slack, Teams, Discord, email and others.

Where do my backups live and how much space will they occupy?

Archives can be saved to local volumes, S3-compatible buckets, Google Drive, Dropbox and other cloud targets. Databasus implements balanced compression, which typically shrinks dump size by 4-8x with incremental only about 20% of runtime overhead, so you have storage and bandwidth savings.

How will I know a backup succeeded — or worse, failed?

Databasus can notify with real-time emails, Slack, Telegram, webhooks, Mattermost, Discord and more. You have the choice of what channels to ping so that your DevOps team hears about successes and failures in real time, making recovery routines and compliance audits easier.

How does Databasus ensure security?

Databasus enforces security on three levels: (1) Sensitive data encryption — all passwords, tokens and credentials are encrypted with AES-256-GCM and stored separately from the database; (2) Backup encryption — each backup file is encrypted with a unique key derived from a master key, backup ID and random salt, making backups useless without your encryption key even if someone gains storage access; (3) Read-only database access — Databasus only requires SELECT permissions and performs comprehensive checks to ensure no write privileges exist, preventing data corruption even if the tool is compr

Is Databasus supported by Anthropic and OpenAI OSS programs?

Yes, in March 2026 Databasus was accepted into both Claude for Open Source by Anthropic and Codex for Open Source by OpenAI. The project has been independently evaluated and recognized by industry leaders as critical open-source infrastructure worth supporting.

How is Databasus different from PgBackRest, Barman or pg_dump?

Databasus prefers simplicity — it provides a modern web interface to manage backups for many databases at once, with built-in scheduling, compression, multiple storage destinations, health monitoring and real-time notifications. At the same time, Databasus also works in agent mode for disaster recovery with WAL archiving and Point-in-Time Recovery. The agent connects from closed networks to the Databasus instance and streams backups, so databases that are not publicly exposed can still be backed up and managed from a single dashboard.