> There are other tools in this space. Worth naming plainly instead of pretending they don't exist.
Why do LLMs like this kind of writing? Why did you need to “plainly” name the competition as opposed to “flamboyantly” naming them?
This is a cool idea but the README is absurdly not-to-the-point.
arjie
It seems to be a self-instruction. Leak from reasoning token into output token or using output token for reasoning. Perhaps something accidental like constraining number of reasoning tokens leads to model using output tokens for reasoning or perhaps ensuring some minimum user-visible reasoning. Seems like an accidentally introduced artifact.
“I should not pretend other implementations don’t exist. I should name them plainly.” Unable to tell itself that it puts this in output so that it can tell itself there.
Same with the “not X but Y” style. It is self-steering introspection leaking into output for one reason or the other. Recent poor language use by model is probably an attempt to minimize this by being concise. But it really needs more thinking to solve problem and so it does some of it in output.
ambicapter
That's funny, we talk about the LLM only having a single data channel as a bad thing for security, but I'd never put 2+2 together to realize the LLM can poison itself as well.
I think this is more Claude writing than LLM writing. GPT-5.6 also talks like an LLM, but not like this.
With GPT-5.6 I get reasonable results with "use natural, plain English". I tried "use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English" but I've found "natural plain English" to work better. Still not on the level I would write, but better.
In the mean time, I hear that Claude resists changing its writing style. A PO used Claude to write release notes and it was full of Claudeisms and tried changing the text into a TED talk. Then he prompted Claude to rewrite in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, and Claude barely changed its writing. Then he switched to GPT-5.6 Terra, and GPT revised everything and made the text much better.
ahmadpiran
Fair, you're right. Thanks for the point. I used ai for a chunk of the build and writing. However, the actual work behind it wasn't AI-generated. I spent a few weeks interviewing people in r/devops and some compliance subs about how they actually test backup restores, and the report schema especially came out directly out of those conversations.
You are also right about the REAME. I'll tighten it up right now, and enhance it. Thank you for the feedback.
progbits
What bothers me personally the most is trying to hide it. Why did you remove Claude's (or whatever you used, but looks like opus to me from the style) co-author info?
I'm willing to use (semi-)vibecoded projects under certain circumstances, but I like to know up front what I'm getting. The github contributors list makes that easy to see as long as people don't try to hide it.
ahmadpiran
I don't have a good defense here, it's fair. But part of that was because of messy commit history and I wanted to have a clean commit history. Maybe it's not a good reason as well, but it was my real intention and my desire of perfectionism :)
reason is that I wanted to take the full control, when ai do the commits you normally don't check the code and you loose the control, well I think it's the most important thing.
But Going forward, for building trust, definitely take your recommendation.
The actual design, the report schema especially, came out of around 30 interviews with people who handle backup testing as part of their job.
Thank you for the feedback.
progbits
Thanks for taking the time to reply! Hope my comment didn't sound too harsh, now that I read it again it might, that's what I get for posting in a hurry.
Seems like you put a lot of thought and effort into it which is awesome, so the LLM readme was ruining first impressions. It's a shame but given the explosion in low effort projects it's important to stand out I think.
ahmadpiran
No worries at all. I take this to improve my working style. I appreciate you circling back to say this :)
306bobby
I don't know if it's just solely how I use them, but when I've had Gemini commit and push things, it has never added a co-author or anything. I've recently been playing with Claude and Opus 5, and it only does it maybe 75% of the time. I truly don't know why
petercooper
CLaude, in particular, quietly, but genuinely and deliberately, overuses adverbs.
RamblingCTO
In German it also does "Ich will dich ehrlich kennen lernen" (I want to get to know you honestly/in an honest fashion). Which is super weird because this AI is the opposite of honest. I saw a bio like that on Bumble today ... Super dystopian and weird.
lbrito
This is a great idea and something I've faced and had to implement manually in the past.
The most common scenario for me was: I implement backup, done by a daily cron calling pg_dump. It worked and I moved on, until one day I needed to restore and the backups did not work. Typically at some point the VM failed to run the commands to clear temporary backup files, the disk would fill up and the new backups would be truncated mid way.
psql is pretty awful at identifying this which must be a very common scenario. Instead of a header check leading to "Corrupted backup, aborting" or something, it simply executes the SQL commands until it reaches the very last line, which will be truncated midway and thus invalid SQL.
Anyway, it took some time to figure out, but later I did basically what your tool does, probably simpler: another daily cron job that downloads the file and checks if it ends with the correct pg_dump success signature. It has worked so far.
csydas
i saw your now dead comment about how no one you interviewed had an answer…
just it’s surprising to me that devops folk aren’t in an org that has backup software, cause this kind of testing is standard load out for most backup softwares, and they even solve the space and isolation issue with various instant restore / publishing capabilities where data from the backup is mounted directly to some staging server with postgres or whatever installed in an isolated area
not trying to knock the idea you are correct most ppl don’t test their backups, but it’s a bit strange no one you talked to used any of the most common backup softwares
definitely in favor of free solutions as backup software field is awful like many ent tech fields, but like the workflows do exist
ahmadpiran
One person I talked to had Veeam SureBackup running and still built a separate check for the database. As I know SureBackup proved the VM boots, but it doesn't know or care if your orders table has the right row count, or if a sequence is broken. That needs a tool that actually understand the specific platform or data, like Postgres, not only the underlying VM.
Also a lot of people I talked to were never use Veeam or Commvault, since they run Postgres on RDS, Supabase, or a simple VM. And even where the tooling exists, it's usually a separate infra tam running it, not the people who actually own this one database, so it never gets wired up for this specific check anyway.
This tool is more for people whose stack never had such a thing, or it's there and nobody's actually using it for this.
csydas
aha that’s sort of what i mean though — your concept is two parts: isolated restore and bespoke tests
the isolation part is something that is more difficult due to space and resource constraints, and a lot of backup apps handle that but expect the user to handle the bespoke testing part
your tool covers both but expects the user to provide both which isn’t always feasible for the application teams (not impossible but lot of red tape to request resources and a lot of resistance if the company already has recovery verification tooling)
if i were you i would refocus your pitch on making it work as part of those backup software workflows, “tell your backup team about this test suite and include it in their recovery verification workflows” and i’m sure you’ll get a lot of attention
most of the dba’s probably have a backup and recovery verification solution at their company with the isolation and resources but they don’t have the bespoke application testing
davedx
This is a great idea. Anything that makes this easier is a win for ops teams.
mannyv
This tool's existence is vaguely horrifying. Why wouldn't a database dump restore? Why wouldn't your dump command tell you it failed?
JodieBenitez
You'd be surprised... we do have horror stories.
sebastiangrill
The problem i see with this approach is that nearly nobody uses dumps as backups.
I consulted Postgres for a few hundred customers and the amount of times that I saw dumps as Backup can probably be counted on two hands.
Does not help that the description reads like AI slop.
ahmadpiran
v1 is pg_dump only because it's the thing that every Postgres install can do natively, and the fastest way to get something really working and tested. Physical backups, pgBackRest specifically are already on the roadmap.
One person on interviews doing this kind of testing was on plain dumps and moving off them, about 18 hours to restore versus 2 with a physical backup tool. I don't want to disagree here, I know dump-based isn't a great long term strategy.
I will enhance the REAME, thank you for the feedback.
ahmadpiran
Nobody disputes that backups need testing. Almost nobody actually does it,
because there's no safe place to restore to and no time to build one. The
people who do automate it usually end up with a cron job and a shell script
that fails in its own quiet way. The real risk was never a bad backup. It's
that quietly not running, or quietly restoring the same stale file,
month after month, with nobody noticing.
restoredrill turns that drill into a single command. It grabs your latest
backup, restores it into a disposable Docker container, runs whatever checks
you configure, and writes out a JSON report with the restore time. Every
check is fail-closed: if it can't run, that's a failure, not something
quietly skipped.
Before writing a line of code I spent a couple weeks asking around r/devops
and a few compliance subreddits how people actually handle this. Nobody had
a clean answer, it was all bespoke scripts or nothing at all. A handful had
already built close to this exact tool for themselves and hit the same wall
every time: automating the restore was the easy part, getting a report
format an auditor would sign off on took months. That's what shaped most of
the report schema here.
The quickstart is meant to take about 10 minutes start to finish: pg_dump a
Supabase or RDS database, point restoredrill at the file, run it against a
local container. No production access, no S3, no CI required just to try it.
Worth naming the alternatives up front. Databasus is a solid self-hosted
backup platform, several database engines, full dashboard, restore
verification built in. BackupDrill does something close to this specifically
for Supabase. restoredrill is narrower on purpose: no dashboard, a report
built for an auditor (fail-closed checks, RPO/RTO evidence, your own SQL
assertions), and it runs as a CI job instead of infrastructure you have to
host.
Why do LLMs like this kind of writing? Why did you need to “plainly” name the competition as opposed to “flamboyantly” naming them?
This is a cool idea but the README is absurdly not-to-the-point.
“I should not pretend other implementations don’t exist. I should name them plainly.” Unable to tell itself that it puts this in output so that it can tell itself there.
Same with the “not X but Y” style. It is self-steering introspection leaking into output for one reason or the other. Recent poor language use by model is probably an attempt to minimize this by being concise. But it really needs more thinking to solve problem and so it does some of it in output.
With GPT-5.6 I get reasonable results with "use natural, plain English". I tried "use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English" but I've found "natural plain English" to work better. Still not on the level I would write, but better.
In the mean time, I hear that Claude resists changing its writing style. A PO used Claude to write release notes and it was full of Claudeisms and tried changing the text into a TED talk. Then he prompted Claude to rewrite in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, and Claude barely changed its writing. Then he switched to GPT-5.6 Terra, and GPT revised everything and made the text much better.
I'm willing to use (semi-)vibecoded projects under certain circumstances, but I like to know up front what I'm getting. The github contributors list makes that easy to see as long as people don't try to hide it.
Seems like you put a lot of thought and effort into it which is awesome, so the LLM readme was ruining first impressions. It's a shame but given the explosion in low effort projects it's important to stand out I think.
The most common scenario for me was: I implement backup, done by a daily cron calling pg_dump. It worked and I moved on, until one day I needed to restore and the backups did not work. Typically at some point the VM failed to run the commands to clear temporary backup files, the disk would fill up and the new backups would be truncated mid way.
psql is pretty awful at identifying this which must be a very common scenario. Instead of a header check leading to "Corrupted backup, aborting" or something, it simply executes the SQL commands until it reaches the very last line, which will be truncated midway and thus invalid SQL.
Anyway, it took some time to figure out, but later I did basically what your tool does, probably simpler: another daily cron job that downloads the file and checks if it ends with the correct pg_dump success signature. It has worked so far.
just it’s surprising to me that devops folk aren’t in an org that has backup software, cause this kind of testing is standard load out for most backup softwares, and they even solve the space and isolation issue with various instant restore / publishing capabilities where data from the backup is mounted directly to some staging server with postgres or whatever installed in an isolated area
not trying to knock the idea you are correct most ppl don’t test their backups, but it’s a bit strange no one you talked to used any of the most common backup softwares
definitely in favor of free solutions as backup software field is awful like many ent tech fields, but like the workflows do exist
the isolation part is something that is more difficult due to space and resource constraints, and a lot of backup apps handle that but expect the user to handle the bespoke testing part
your tool covers both but expects the user to provide both which isn’t always feasible for the application teams (not impossible but lot of red tape to request resources and a lot of resistance if the company already has recovery verification tooling)
if i were you i would refocus your pitch on making it work as part of those backup software workflows, “tell your backup team about this test suite and include it in their recovery verification workflows” and i’m sure you’ll get a lot of attention
most of the dba’s probably have a backup and recovery verification solution at their company with the isolation and resources but they don’t have the bespoke application testing
Does not help that the description reads like AI slop.
restoredrill turns that drill into a single command. It grabs your latest backup, restores it into a disposable Docker container, runs whatever checks you configure, and writes out a JSON report with the restore time. Every check is fail-closed: if it can't run, that's a failure, not something quietly skipped.
Before writing a line of code I spent a couple weeks asking around r/devops and a few compliance subreddits how people actually handle this. Nobody had a clean answer, it was all bespoke scripts or nothing at all. A handful had already built close to this exact tool for themselves and hit the same wall every time: automating the restore was the easy part, getting a report format an auditor would sign off on took months. That's what shaped most of the report schema here.
The quickstart is meant to take about 10 minutes start to finish: pg_dump a Supabase or RDS database, point restoredrill at the file, run it against a local container. No production access, no S3, no CI required just to try it.
Worth naming the alternatives up front. Databasus is a solid self-hosted backup platform, several database engines, full dashboard, restore verification built in. BackupDrill does something close to this specifically for Supabase. restoredrill is narrower on purpose: no dashboard, a report built for an auditor (fail-closed checks, RPO/RTO evidence, your own SQL assertions), and it runs as a CI job instead of infrastructure you have to host.
Postgres only for the moment, pgBackRest and WAL support are on the roadmap. MIT licensed. Repo: https://github.com/ahmadpiran/restoredrill
Would like to hear what people think, especially if you've built something like this yourself and ran into the same report-format problem.