Most of these are good products for a different failure
This is not a feature comparison and we are not going to tell you that AWS Backup is bad. It is a comparison of one structural property: when the thing holding your data is compromised, does the copy go with it.
What is being compared
Cloud-native backup
AWS Backup, Azure Backup, GCP Backup and DR
A managed service that orchestrates backups of resources inside the same cloud provider, into vaults in an account you hold.
Built-in snapshots
RDS automated backups, EBS snapshots, managed database PITR
The database or volume's own backup feature, stored by the same provider that runs the resource.
A script and a bucket
cron, pg_dump, rclone, a storage bucket
The DIY option. A scheduled command writes a dump to object storage.
saved.sh
this product
Orchestration and custody deliberately separated from the account that runs the data.
| Property | Cloud-native | Snapshots | Script | saved.sh |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Survives a dropped table or bad deploy The failure everyone plans for. Every option here handles it. | ||||
Copy sits outside the account holding the data Cloud-native services can write cross-account and cross-region, which is configuration you have to get right. Snapshots are held by the provider that runs the resource. | ||||
Survives compromise of the cloud account Follows directly from the row above: if the copy answers to the same control plane, it shares the blast radius. | ||||
Works across providers and on-premise Cloud-native services are scoped to their own provider's resources by design. | ||||
Encrypted with a key the vendor never holds Provider-managed and customer-managed keys both live in the provider's KMS. We hold public keys only, so we cannot decrypt in any configuration. | ||||
Hold cannot be shortened by whoever holds the account Vault Lock and Object Lock enforce this at the storage layer. Ours is enforced in our code: it stops the account holder and our own sweep, and not someone holding our bucket credentials. Weaker than a storage-layer lock, and we would rather say so. | ||||
Verifiable history of every run A script writing to a bucket leaves a directory listing, which cannot tell you about a run that never happened. | ||||
Restorable without the vendor's tooling Snapshots and vault-format backups generally restore through the provider's own API. Our artifacts are standard compression and standard encryption. | ||||
Backs up things with no connector Anything you can produce a file from, via a script source or a push. |
Two failures everyone plans for, four that end companies
Cases where you should use one of the others
You need point-in-time recovery to the second
A managed database's own continuous backup replays a transaction log and can land you on an exact moment. We take periodic logical backups, which is a coarser instrument. Use both: theirs for the dropped table, ours for the compromised account.
You need to restore a whole machine image
Volume and VM snapshots restore infrastructure, not data. That is a different job and we do not do it.
Your compliance process requires an audited vendor
We have no SOC 2 report and none in progress. If that is a hard requirement, one of the large providers is genuinely your answer today.
The data never leaves one cloud and you accept that risk
If a compromised account is outside your threat model, a cloud-native service configured cross-account is simpler and already in your bill.
Comparisons describe published product behaviour and are limited to structural properties rather than features, pricing or reliability. Products change. If something here is out of date or wrong, tell us at hello@saved.sh and we will correct it. All trademarks belong to their owners.
Run it alongside what you already have
Nothing here asks you to turn off your existing backups. A second copy on a different trust boundary is the whole product.