TL;DR: The thing that finally broke me wasn't a failed restore. It was a successful restore that silently put the database in the wrong state.

📖 Reading time: ~27 min

What's in this article

The Script Graveyard Problem (Why I Was Even Looking)

What Portabase Actually Is (Without the Marketing Speak)

Installing Portabase v1.13

Running Your First Backup

Restoring a Backup (The Part That Actually Matters)

The 3 Things That Surprised Me After Daily Use

When NOT to Use Portabase

Portabase vs. Rolling Your Own pg_dump Scripts

The Script Graveyard Problem (Why I Was Even Looking)

The thing that finally broke me wasn't a failed restore. It was a successful restore that silently put the database in the wrong state. I restored a three-month-old Postgres dump onto a staging box, ran the app, and everything looked fine — until a teammate noticed we were missing two columns that a migration had added in week six. The dump was fine. The migration history wasn't captured anywhere near it.…