Databasus vs BackupDrill — self-hosted and free vs hosted with Storage files

These two agree on the thing most backup tools skip: a backup is not real until something restores it, and both restore-test their backups automatically. Databasus does it free, open source, on a server you run; BackupDrill does it as a hosted service that backs up Storage files alongside the database. Here is the honest version, facts checked in July 2026.

Side by side

Facts checked against Databasus’s site, docs, and GitHub in July 2026 — they ship frequently, so check their site for current details. One shared limitation, stated plainly: Supabase restricts access to its managed schemas, so for Supabase both tools back up the public schema — neither captures auth or storage internals.

Choose Databasus if

• You want free and you have the ops muscle. It is a Docker container on your VPS — in exchange you own its updates, its monitoring, and keeping the machine it runs on alive. If that is routine work for your team, free with real restore verification is hard to argue with.
• You need tighter recovery points than snapshots — for databases Databasus can reach directly. Its WAL streaming for point-in-time recovery and physical full and incremental backups (PostgreSQL 17+) are capabilities BackupDrill does not have at any price, but they do not apply to Supabase-managed projects, which it reaches over the Session Pooler as logical dumps. (The same trade-off as Supabase’s own PITR, but self-hosted and free.)
• You back up more than Supabase. It covers PostgreSQL 14–18, MySQL, MariaDB, and MongoDB from one place; BackupDrill is Supabase-Postgres-only.
• You want no third party in the data path. Self-hosted means your bytes never transit anyone else’s machines. With BackupDrill, backups stream through our workers into your bucket — never written to our disks, but transit is transit.

Choose BackupDrill if

• You want the verification without running the verifier. Self-hosted backup tools have a recursive problem: something has to watch the machine that watches your backups. Hosted, the backups and drills run on our schedule, failures are emailed on every plan including free, and there is no backup server on your books to patch or monitor.
• Your Supabase Storage files matter. Databasus does not back them up — its Supabase dump covers the public schema, so neither your uploaded files nor their storage.objects metadata are captured, and uploads need a separate answer entirely. BackupDrill backs up the files with the database, and every drill reads sampled files back from your bucket and checks their sha256 against the manifest.
• You want the report to be the deliverable. Every drill produces a graded report by email; on Agency, client-ready PDF reports — evidence you can forward to a stakeholder instead of screenshotting a dashboard on your own server.
• You want your bucket without your infrastructure. Both tools write to storage you control; the difference is whether a backup machine comes with it. BackupDrill writes standard pg_dump archives plus plain files to your own S3, R2, or B2 bucket — restorable anywhere pg_restore runs, with or without us (see restore & recovery).

The one-sentence difference

Databasus and BackupDrill are the two tools on our own roundup that restore-test backups — so the real question is not whether verification happens but who operates it, and whether your Storage files are in the drill. If you would rather own the machine, Databasus is excellent and free; if you would rather receive the report, start with the quickstart — the free plan covers one project.

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