A backup product should survive its own vendor.
WHY OFFSITEDB EXISTS
Who runs this
OffsiteDB is built and operated by Tyler Ardissono, a systems and infrastructure engineer who builds things that work. By day I own and operate Panhandle Tech Net, a wireless ISP serving Oshkosh and the surrounding area in western Nebraska, and I do hardware and software consulting on the side.
Running an ISP means real people lose real things when infrastructure fails — so “the platform has backups” versus “I have backups” isn't an abstraction to me, it's a Tuesday. OffsiteDB is a small, focused operation by design: one product, one job, done properly.
You can reach the person who wrote the code at [email protected]. Support replies come from the operator, not a queue.
Why it exists
The consulting is where it started: I kept watching teams discover, at the worst possible moment, that their backups didn't exist, didn't restore, or lived in the same account they'd just lost. Managed Postgres made databases easy and quietly concentrated the risk — your data, your platform snapshots, and your account access all behind the same login, in the same region, on the same vendor. A bad migration, a billing lapse, or a compromised credential can take all three at once.
OffsiteDB does the unglamorous thing ops teams have always done — scheduled, encrypted, off-site dumps in storage you control — and adds the part almost everyone skips: actually restoring each backup to prove it works.
The disappearance question
Every small vendor should answer this on page one, so here it is: if OffsiteDB shut down tomorrow, you lose nothing.
- Your snapshots live in your own S3 or R2 bucket — we never hold the only copy.
- Every artifact is a standard pg_dump custom-format archive. It restores with stock pg_restore — no OffsiteDB software required, ever.
- Decryption uses standard AES-256-GCM. If the service were ever wound down, customers would receive their key material and a documented offline decryption procedure as part of shutdown.
The principles
- Never hold the only copy. Your bucket, your data, your exit.
- A backup is not a backup until it has restored. Drills, not vibes.
- Boring formats. pg_dump, gzip, AES-GCM. Nothing proprietary between you and your data.
- Tell the truth. Honest failure alerts, honest status, honest marketing.