We Lost Data in a Migration, So I Built Backupguardian to Validate Backups

During a production migration last year, we hit a nightmare: our backups looked fine, but restoring revealed schema mismatches and partial data loss. It cost hours of downtime, and we realized… we had no way to validate backups before trusting them.

That led me to build BackupGuardian — an open-source tool to validate database backups before migration or recovery.

What it does:

Detects corrupt/incomplete backups (.sql, .dump, .backup)

Verifies schema, foreign keys, constraints

Checks data integrity, row counts, encoding issues

CLI + Web App + API (CI/CD ready)

Supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite

Example:

npm install -g backup-guardian backup-guardian validate my-backup.sql

You get a report with a migration score, schema checks, and recommendations (like missing indexes).

We’re open source (MIT) → GitHub repo .

I’d love feedback on:

Other hidden backup issues you’ve run into

Integrations that would help (CI/CD? Slack alerts? MongoDB support?)

Whether this is useful for your workflows

Thanks!