Automated 100 critical data backups using Barman, Google Cloud, Bash, and Python, ensuring data integrity across databases.

Situation. The critical GIS data, the application instances and the databases were scattered across systems with backups that were inconsistent and partly manual. For a product that lives on its data, that’s not a risk you can leave sitting — and the day you actually need a backup is precisely the worst day to find out it was incomplete.

Task. The task was to guarantee that all the critical data could be recovered, which meant automating comprehensive, verified backups across the whole estate — verified being the word that matters.

Action. The backup regime was built end to end. A hundred critical data backups got automated, with Barman handling the PostgreSQL side and Google Cloud holding the offsite copies, and the whole thing was orchestrated and validated with Bash and Python — because a backup you’ve taken but never checked isn’t really a backup, it’s a hope. So there were retention policies to keep them current and integrity checks to confirm each one was actually good, not just present.

Result. Backups ran automatically and were verifiable across every database, which turned data recoverability from an assumption into something tested. A major operational risk came off the business and got replaced with a recovery path you could actually trust — the difference being that this one had been checked, not just configured.