Backups & Restore

All persistent Quibble state lives in Postgres. Redis holds only ephemeral game state — active games in progress — and does not need to be backed up.

What to back up

Data	Location	Required
Question banks and questions	Postgres	Yes
Quizzes and rounds	Postgres	Yes
Game history and answers	Postgres	Yes
User accounts	Postgres	Yes
Active game state	Redis	No (ephemeral)

Postgres backup

pg_dump (manual)

pg_dump "${DATABASE_URL}" \
  --format=custom \
  --no-acl \
  --no-owner \
  -f quibble-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).dump

Restore

pg_restore \
  --no-acl \
  --no-owner \
  -d "${DATABASE_URL}" \
  quibble-20260101-120000.dump

Managed Postgres backups

If you’re using a managed Postgres service, enable automated backups in the provider’s dashboard:

• Neon: point-in-time restore is available on all plans
• DigitalOcean Managed Postgres: daily backups with 7-day retention
• AWS RDS: automated backups + manual snapshots

Kubernetes CronJob

For in-cluster backups using a scheduled Kubernetes job:

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: quibble-backup
  namespace: quibble
spec:
  schedule: "0 3 * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: backup
              image: postgres:16-alpine
              env:
                - name: DATABASE_URL
                  valueFrom:
                    secretKeyRef:
                      name: quibble-secrets
                      key: databaseUrl
              command:
                - /bin/sh
                - -c
                - |
                  pg_dump "$DATABASE_URL" \
                    --format=custom \
                    -f /backup/quibble-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).dump
              volumeMounts:
                - name: backup
                  mountPath: /backup
          volumes:
            - name: backup
              persistentVolumeClaim:
                claimName: quibble-backup-pvc
          restartPolicy: OnFailure