Like I mentioned, I don’t have experience working in a start up. My real world experience with backup/recovery of a live relational DB has been with Oracle using ZDLRA - and indeed its license probably costs dearly.
For stuff like MariaDB a quick search also finds options to perform snapshots, backups, restores etc.
And if you need to be super high available, set up a distributed DB like Cassandra - you lose the relational and transaction part, but at least you’re running a product with known failure modes and known ways to prevent/circumvent them.
I guess my bigger point is that besides “don’t roll your own crypto”, I’d also advice not to roll your own DB. There’s a lot of known stuff in the market, all built by people who made and fixed the mistakes you’re going to make a long time ago.
For stuff like MariaDB a quick search also finds options to perform snapshots, backups, restores etc.
And if you need to be super high available, set up a distributed DB like Cassandra - you lose the relational and transaction part, but at least you’re running a product with known failure modes and known ways to prevent/circumvent them.
I guess my bigger point is that besides “don’t roll your own crypto”, I’d also advice not to roll your own DB. There’s a lot of known stuff in the market, all built by people who made and fixed the mistakes you’re going to make a long time ago.