How to Choose the Right Database Backup Strategy for Your SaaS

Backups are one of those things every SaaS team knows they should take seriously, and most don’t—until something goes wrong. A botched migration, a runaway DELETE query, a ransomware attack, a cloud provider outage: any of these can take your product offline and your customer data with it. The question isn’t whether you need a backup strategy. It’s whether the one you have will actually save you when you need it.

This guide cuts through the theory and gives you a practical framework for choosing and implementing a database backup strategy that fits where your SaaS is today and where it’s going.

The Three Backup Types: Full, Incremental, and Differential

Every backup strategy is built from some combination of three fundamental approaches. Understanding what each one trades off is the starting point for any decision you make.

Full Backups

A full backup captures the entire database at a point in time. It’s the simplest to understand and the simplest to restore from—you have one file, you restore it, you’re done. The downside is size and time. If your database is 50 GB, every full backup is 50 GB. Run them daily and you’re storing 350 GB per week before any retention policy kicks in.

Full backups make the most sense when your database is small enough that the overhead is negligible, or as the baseline in a more complex strategy. For most early-stage SaaS products with databases under a few gigabytes, running daily full backups is the right call. Simple, reliable, easy to test.

Incremental Backups

An incremental backup captures only what changed since the last backup of any kind—whether that was a full backup or a previous incremental. The storage cost is low and the backup window is short, which makes it attractive for large databases with frequent changes.

The catch is restore complexity. To recover to a point in time, you need the last full backup plus every incremental backup taken since then, applied in order. If any piece of the chain is missing or corrupted, restoration fails or produces inconsistent data.

Differential Backups

A differential backup captures everything that changed since the last full backup—not since the last backup. This means each differential is larger than the previous one, but restoration only requires two pieces: the last full backup and the most recent differential. No chain to manage.

RPO and RTO: The Two Numbers That Actually Matter

Before you can choose a backup strategy, you need to know what you’re optimizing for. Two metrics define this.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

RPO answers: how much data loss can you tolerate? It’s expressed as a time window. An RPO of 24 hours means that in a worst-case failure, you might lose up to 24 hours of data. An RPO of 1 hour means you might lose 1 hour.

Your RPO drives how frequently you take backups. If you can tolerate 24 hours of data loss, daily backups are sufficient. If you need to guarantee no more than 15 minutes of loss, you’re looking at near-continuous backups or database replication.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

RTO answers: how long can your service be down during a recovery? It’s the maximum acceptable downtime from the moment of failure to the moment the system is back online.

The practical implication: test your restores. Know exactly how long restoration takes. Many teams discover their real RTO only when they’re in the middle of an incident.

Where to Store Backups: On-Site, Off-Site, and Cloud

On-Site Backups

Storing backups on the same server or in the same data center as your primary database is fast to write and fast to restore. It’s also nearly useless against the scenarios that cause real disasters: hardware failure, data center outage, ransomware that spreads to local storage.

Cloud Backups

Cloud object storage (S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, or compatible alternatives) is the right answer for almost every SaaS team. It’s geographically separated from your primary infrastructure, infinitely scalable, cheap per GB, and durable by design.

Encryption: Non-Negotiable

Any database backup worth having must be encrypted. Your backups contain the same sensitive data as your production database. Encryption at rest provided by the storage provider is a baseline, not a solution—the provider holds the keys.

The stronger model is client-side encryption with zero-knowledge architecture: you encrypt the data before it leaves your environment, using a key that only you hold. AES-256-GCM is the standard, providing both confidentiality and integrity.

Where Calm Backup Fits In

For small-to-mid SaaS teams, the challenge isn’t understanding why backups matter—it’s building a system that’s reliable enough to trust without consuming engineering time. Calm Backup is built for this use case:

composer require calmbackup/backup
php artisan backup:install
php artisan backup:run

Encryption happens locally before upload—AES-256-GCM, with your key. Calm Backup never has access to your encryption key or your data. The service handles scheduling, missed backup detection, and checksum verification. When you need to restore:

vendor/bin/calmbackup restore

Practical Recommendations by Stage

Early Stage (under 1 GB, small team)

Daily full backups to cloud storage

14-day retention minimum

Client-side encryption

Test restore at least monthly

Growth Stage (1–50 GB, revenue-dependent customers)

Full backups daily, incrementals every 1–4 hours

30-day retention with point-in-time recovery

Automated alerting on missed backups

Quarterly restore drills

Scale Stage (50+ GB, enterprise customers)

Continuous replication plus scheduled backups

Multi-region backup storage

Formal disaster recovery runbooks

Regular tested failover exercises

The One Thing Most Teams Skip

The single most common failure mode isn’t a missing backup—it’s an untested one. Teams set up backup automation, confirm that files are appearing, and never actually restore from them until an incident forces the issue. A backup you’ve never restored from is a hypothesis, not a guarantee. Test it.