How often do you backup your production database?

I do 2 full backups daily, one at Midnight and the other at Midday. Hourly transaction log backups. All backups are immediately checked for corruption and successful restoring before being kept.

Everything is a fully automated process that runs backups, quality check and then uploads to S3 bucket and it purges backups they are 91 days old.

Corrupt backups are as bad as no backups!

This is really something you have to answer yourself as only you know what your database looks like, how much data we are talking about, how much down time / lost data you can stomach and possibly SLAs with your customers. Is a downtime going to anger your customers or are they just free users?

Additionally this really depends on what your database is doing. If you are just recording some events from your app and you are okay with losing x hours of events then that's your backup schedule.

If it's something critical like user data and losing x hours of user data means you are losing paying customers then the goal has to be to make this window as small as possible. You can easily calculate how much revenue you'd be losing in this case and decide based on that.

That said, there's multiple options, the most popular is probably incremental backups + full backups in a longer interval:

1. Run incremental backups every hour / 30 min, then have a daily backup, monthly backup and then thin them out after that. That way you are also safe in case there's a regression you don't immediately spot and only realize a few weeks later. (Like silently overwriting some values)

2. Use a master-slave architecture so you can easily fail over in case there's an issue with your main DB.

3. Use a hosted database solution and let them worry about it but don't forget to read up what their backup strategy actually is.

Depends on the nature of your app and size of the database. I backup my main site every 15 min, and my blog once a day. Backups are so cheap on S3 there is no reason not to backup very frequently. I also have replication turned on in S3 so every backup in region A is automatically copied to region B. There are much more sophisticated backup schemes but I'm not there yet, this seems good enough for me for now 😄

I take one every 3 days and upload it to a secure S3 bucket, though I’m considering taking daily snapshots as my user base grows and grows.

There is no reason to back up your database if you have proper redundancy and replication. If you are using any SQL databases they should have some type of master-slave replication scheme running on Paxos or Raft algorithm. You can configure one of them to be a lag copy that is always several days behind as your backup.