Awesome Lists Are Just the Start
You found 47 backup tools. Now which one actually fits your needs?
Try the Documentation Tool Selector
6 tools evaluated, 8 anti-patterns documented. Get your recommendation in 2 minutes.
More selectors coming soon (backup, monitoring, security)
You've Been Here Before
→ Search "backup tool linux"
→ Find awesome-selfhosted
→ Scroll to backup section
→ See 47 tools listed
→ Read descriptions:
"A backup tool written in Rust"
"Fast, secure backups"
"Backup solution for Linux"
"Modern backup utility"
→ Open 15 tabs
→ Compare for 2 hours
→ Now stuck choosing between them
Awesome lists are great for finding what exists. But then you need to choose.
This is the operational context awesome lists can't provide.
"We Have Backups" Is Not a Backup Strategy
Automated backups run nightly. Logs show "backup completed successfully." Team feels confident. No one has ever restored one.
"Backup completed" means files were written somewhere. It doesn't mean those files are complete, uncorrupted, or that anyone knows how to restore them under pressure at 2am.
Schedule restore drills. Monthly minimum. Restore to a test environment. Time it. Document who can do it. If only one person knows how, you don't have backups — you have a lottery ticket.
This anti-pattern appears in the Backup Tool Selector along with 14 others. Every selector includes failure patterns we've seen in production.
What You Get
Not just another list. A decision-making tool built from operational experience.
Guided Selection
Answer 5-7 questions about your actual situation. Get 2-3 recommendations with reasoning — not 47 options with identical descriptions.
"What are you backing up?"
"Where does it need to go?"
"What's your recovery time requirement?"
Anti-Patterns Included
"This looks fine but still breaks." Every selector includes failure patterns from production. Learn from others' incidents before you create your own.
• Backups on same disk as data
• Retention policy shorter than detection time
• No one else knows the restore process
Exportable Decision Records
Generate an ADR (Architecture Decision Record) with your reasoning, tradeoffs considered, implementation steps, and rollback plan. Share with your team or future self.
# ADR-001: Backup Tool Selection
Status: Accepted
Context: Need offsite backups for Postgres...
Landscape Integration
Every tool maps to capabilities in the Operated Platform Landscape. See how your choice fits the bigger picture — what it enables, what it requires, what comes next.
Restic → Covers: #23 Database Backups
Requires: #24 Offsite Storage
Enables: #27 Restore Drills
Available Selectors
Each selector covers a category from the Operated Platform Landscape. More coming as we document additional capability areas.
Documentation Tool Selector
Find the right docs tool based on your needs. SSG, wiki, or markdown in git?
Backup Tool Selector
Database, files, or full server? Local, remote, or cloud? Get tailored recommendations.
Monitoring Tool Selector
Infrastructure, application, or business metrics? Self-hosted or cloud?
Security Tool Selector
Threat-model based selection. SAST, DAST, secrets scanning, and more.
Why This Exists
I spent years in enterprise IT — the kind where a bad tool choice means a 3am incident call, a post-mortem, and explaining to leadership why backups existed but couldn't be restored.
That experience builds judgment. You learn which tools fail gracefully and which fail catastrophically. You learn that the tool with the most GitHub stars isn't always the right choice. You learn that "it depends" isn't helpful — what matters is what it depends on.
These selectors are that judgment, externalized. Not just "here are your options" but "here's what matters for your situation, here's what breaks, here's what I'd actually choose."
AI can generate another list. It can't tell you that Duplicati's UI is nice but it'll choke on your 500GB media folder. That comes from watching it happen.
See the Full Picture
Tool selectors are one piece. The Operated Platform Landscape maps 71 capabilities from source to production — and shows how they connect.