Frequently asked questions

SQLBackup is $5/month, billed annually ($60/year) — one plan, every feature included, no per-database upsells. It works in order: (1) try everything free for 15 days with no credit card and no charge; (2) only if you keep it do you buy a licence after the trial; (3) and even then you're covered by a 14-day money-back guarantee on your purchase. That's up to 29 days risk-free. See the pricing page.

No. There is no SQLBackup cloud service. Backups are encrypted on your machine and uploaded directly to your storage. Database and storage credentials are read from environment variables you control. Nothing phones home — we never receive your data, your passwords, or your encryption key.

Backups are encrypted client-side with authenticated AES-256-GCM. The key is derived from your password using scrypt with a random per-file salt. The backup is encrypted in 64 KB chunks, each with a fresh nonce that authenticates its own position — so chunks can't be reordered, dropped, or swapped without the restore failing. Full details on the security page.

The backup becomes unrecoverable — by design. There is no master key or backdoor; that's exactly what makes the encryption trustworthy. Store your encryption password in a password manager or secrets vault, and keep it somewhere separate from the backups themselves.

Local disk or NAS, Amazon S3, any S3-compatible provider (Wasabi, Backblaze B2, MinIO, and others via a custom endpoint), and SFTP servers. You can send the same backup to several destinations at once, each with its own retention policy.

Each job has a standard 5-field cron schedule (for example 0 2 * * * for nightly at 2 AM). Run sqlbackup run and the built-in scheduler stays up and fires every job at its scheduled time. On Windows you can run the desktop app or register it to start with the machine; on Linux, run it as a service.

Full backups for every engine. For SQL Server, SQLBackup also supports differential and transaction-log backups, so you can build a chain for point-in-time recovery.

One command: sqlbackup restore. It downloads the backup from your chosen destination, decrypts and verifies it, decompresses it, and restores into a database you name — often a fresh database so you can verify before swapping. Try the interactive restore demo.

Yes. There's a Windows desktop app with a dashboard, and a cross-platform CLI/agent that runs headless on Windows or Linux. It needs Python 3.10+ (the desktop build bundles what it needs).

SQLBackup uses each engine's standard dump tools, which are designed to take consistent backups with minimal impact. Compression and encryption happen as a stream on the backup machine, so the heavy lifting doesn't sit on your database. Schedule jobs for off-peak hours for the lightest footprint.

Every run is recorded in a local history database and surfaced on the dashboard as a health percentage and a "needs attention" list. You can also enable email alerts so you get a message the moment a job fails (and optionally on success).